The check must have finally cleared, or: Mawson's incompetent "vaxed/unvaxed" study is back online

You might be wondering what I'm referring to. A little more than a week ago, I took note of how a truly awful survey masquerading as a "study" had risen from the dead once again as two publications in a notorious bottom-feeding predatory "open access" journal after having been retracted after publication in a somewhat less notorious but similarly bottom-feeding predatory "open access" journal. Whether or not these studies were actually retracted the second time around is somewhat unclear. What is known is that they were on the Open Access Text (OAT) website, and then they weren't.

For the second time, a journal has quickly retracted a study that suggested vaccines raise the risk of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.

The study first raised a furor last year, prompting a Frontiers journal to quickly retract it. After it was republished in the Journal of Translational Science this month, that journal has also retracted it.

Although the titles of the two papers changed, the abstracts were nearly identical. Both studies surveyed the parents of 666 home-schooled children, 39% of whom where not vaccinated, and concluded that vaccination increased the risk of neurodevelopmental problems, particularly if children were born prematurely.

A representative of the Journal of Translational Science told us “Pilot comparative study on the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated 6- to 12-year-old U.S. children” has been retracted, and it will update us with an explanation.

Not surprisingly, that never happened, and the mystery remained. Someone from the journal told Retraction Watch that the studies had been retracted, and then yesterday people started noticing that they were back on OAT website. Not surprisingly, given the nature of OAT journals, including the Journal of Translational Science, the jokes about the check finally having cleared wrote themselves. My purpose here is not to reiterate what's wrong with the two studies, the first of which purported to show that vaccinated children are much unhealthier than unvaccinated children, and the second of which purported to show that the only reason premature birth is a risk factor for neurodevelopmental disorders is because of vaccines. I discussed them both in great detail quite enough. I'm more interested in what this whole incident shows about the bankruptcy of antivaccine "science." Whatever happened, the CMSRI is gloating that the studies are back:

For instance, there's Celeste McGovern, some of whose antivaccine nonsense I missed last week, referring to the study as the "big taboo." That's how antivaxers always portray themselves, as the persecuted warriors for "truth" while those evil "skeptics" (or "Skeptics," as McGovern refers to them) are trying to "suppress" that truth. Here, she describes what happened when a Frontiers journal first retracted the Mawson paper:

There was no thought or delay in the Skeptic response. They did not waste time with letters of inquiry or professional concern. They did not wait to consider the methodology or the data or its interpretation or to read the full discussion.

Um, no. It was apparent from what we knew about the genesis of the survey and from the abstract itself that the methodology was without merit. McGovern was only getting started, though:

They jeered and screamed “anti-vaxx” – which is the equivalent of ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ and thrown like a bludgeon at anyone, even a credible professor and researcher with a 30-year career, who questions the safety of the expanding use of this particular type of pharmaceutical product for children. “Anti-vaxx” is a silencer.

A fumbling editor at Frontiers tweeted in haste that the study had only been provisionally accepted and the review would be re-opened “in response to concerns raised.”

One skeptic is gloating that he is solely responsible for blighting the entire study consideration process:

“I pride myself to have caused the Frontiers anti-vaxx retraction with one tweet!” Leonid Schneider tweeted this week. “The anti-vaxx paper was published as abstract, a reader alerted me, I tweeted, Frontiers got scared, pulled the paper.”

Even Retraction Watch reported the story that way. After receiving criticism on Twitter, Frontiers released a public statement, noting that the study was only “provisionally accepted but not published,” and is being re-reviewed. “

I described what happened when it happened. From my perspective, the study was so bad that even a Frontiers journal considered it too bad to complete the publication process and publish the entire article. So Mawson shopped the paper around and found a journal with even lower standards than a Frontiers journal.

McGovern then addresses the most recent "retraction" (or whatever the temporary "depublishing" of Mawson's papers was):

Now, an editor at the Journal of Translational Science has bowed to these forces again. Retraction Watch reports that the study has been “retracted – again.” But there has been no formal statement issued by the journal. I emailed the Editor in Chief, Terry Lichtor, a professor at Arkansas State University, twice. When I didn’t hear from him I called the London office and was told they would telephone him to make sure he got my questions. The person on the phone seemed to know about my emails. I’ve had no reply.

I contacted two editors at Retraction Watch and asked if they weren’t using the term “retracted” rather loosely for the study, considering the professional ethics and implications. No reply.

“With millions of views, the concerns that this study raises will not be easily wiped away from the public consciousness,” says Claire Dwoskin, founder of the Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute, which contributed to funding for the study.

“It would more greatly serve the interests of public health and science to replicate the study on a larger scale and determine the accuracy of the results, rather than harkening back to a time where book burning and persecution of scientists reigned the day. If the study is not restored on the journal's website, it may be fair to conclude that some of the lessons of the past have not been learned after all.”

This is the dodge that all quacks and pseudoscience advocates fall back on whenenver their terrible scientific methodology and bogus studies are criticized. In the case of one of the studies, we know that one of its key findings is so out of whack with what is known from many, many, many high quality studies dating back to the 1970s showing that premature birth is a major risk factor for neurodevelopmental disorders that it was a huge red flag. Moreover, the methodology and statistical analyses of the studies were so bad, so incompetently carried out, that it's quite safe to say that the results are almost certainly invalid. There is no need for "further research," at least not based on Mawson's utter dreck of a couple of studies. But I do love how predictable McGovern is in crying, "Persecution!" and comparing a retraction to a book burning.

She also, like most antivaxers, misunderstands what scientists mean when they refer to a finding as "settled science":

But people who say “vaccine science is settled” are being dishonest. Science is never settled. By its very nature, science questions orthodoxies and constantly seeks and discovers new things.

Well, yes, but not quite how McGovern means it. There are certain findings in science that are so well-supported by evidence that the burden of evidence to change or refute these findings is very, very high. Such findings are considered "settled science." That's not to say that they are findings that will never be changed or even radically altered; rather, it's a recognition of just how high the bar is to challenge findings in terms of evidence, given the level of evidence supporting the them.

I like to use homeopathy as an example because it is so incredibly, ridiculously improbable and for homeopathy to work huge swaths of existing chemistry and science would have gto be not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. Even so, I concede the tiny possibility that this much science might be wrong but point out that to demonstrate that homeopathy "works" would take a mass of evidence at least as large, high quality, and compelling as the existing scientific evidence supporting current theory in physics and chemistry. One little study won't do it. But that's what homepathy advocates cite.

The same is true for antivaxers. Although it is less implausible that vaccines might cause autism than that homeopathy works, it is still very, very implausible indeed, based on a large, robust, and mutually reinforcing body of scientific research from multiple disciplines. Two crappy "studies" based on a crappy "survey" of an unrepresentative population, which, when you come right down to it is all Mawson's "studies" are, won't seriously challenge the existing scientific consensus that vaccines are not a risk factor for autism. Not even close!

None of this stops McGovern from engaging in the common crank fantasy of ultimate vindication:

Skeptics have closed ranks against this one line of inquiry. We don’t know how important that line is. But we can be pretty sure that history repeats itself and when medical history textbooks are rewritten a long time from now, there will be names of medical heroes like Semelweiss in there, people who challenged orthodoxy and went where no one wanted to go. And there will be brief allusions to the hordes of nameless scientific fools who impeded medical progress while countless children suffered.

Of course, skeptics have not "closed ranks against this one line of inquiry." We merely point out how incompetently Mawson and other antivaxers engage in this line of inquiry. After all, it's not as though real scientists (as opposed to antivaccine scientists) haven't done "vaxed/unvaxed" studies before comparing health outcomes between the two groups. There have been several such studies. And guess what? The results aren't what antivaxers would have you believe. Such studies have generally found either that there is no difference between the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated children or that vaccinated children are actually healthier. But that's not what people like McGovern want to hear.

I can't help but finish with a very old "friend" of the blog, J.B. Handley, founder of the antivaccine group Generation Rescue:

If you're confused, you're not alone. And just to clarify: this study has NEVER been retracted, only removed by two journals, and re-published by the second one...Starting to think this is the study that just "won't go away!"

I notice that The Gnat also thinks I wouldn't address this. Silly Gnat.

No, it is, as I referred to it before, the zombie study. Or the Jason study. Or the Michael Myers study. Or the Freddy Krueger study. Or pick the name of your favorite movie monster that appears to die at the end of one movie and always returns for another movie to kill again. I hope Retraction Watch will follow up on what happened, but somehow I doubt that there will ever be a coherent answer to the question of what happened here. My best guess remains that the check finally cleared, because Mawson's study is so bad that even a pay-to-publish journal balked.

More like this

Over the last couple of days, I've been writing about two incredibly bad "studies" by Anthony Mawson, an antivaccinationist and Andrew Wakefield fanboi, who first published one of them in a bottom-feeding predatory open access journal and saw it retracted. Then he appears to have divided the study…

[Editorial update: I woke up this morning to find out that the answer to my question in the title is almost certainly yes. The post has been quickly altered to reflect that. See below.]
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There are a thousand crappy studies out there carried out with the explicit (although often unspoken) goal of demonizing vaccines by "proving" that they cause autism. Indeed, over the last 12+ years that I've been blogging here, I've deconstructed more such studies than I can remember—or would care…

Some posts I really enjoy doing. I'm so fired up by the topic that the words flow, and I finish a post in record time. Other posts are more of a chore, written not so much because I'm excited by the topic, but because I feel duty bound to address it. I feel the need to write such posts when, for…

Hi Orac:

In a recent post, you cited the "thoughtscapism" blog article on "vax-unvax" studies.

Orac sattes: " it is a myth that there are no studies comparing the health of vaccinated children compared to unvaccinated children. In fact, there have been several. It turns out that they don’t show what antivaxers think a vaxed/unvaxed study will show. Basically, all of the vaxed/unvaxed studies not done by antivaccine-friendly scientists or quacks have shown either no differences in the prevalence of neurodevelopmental or chronic diseases between vaccinated children and unvaccinated children"

The studies cited did not actually look at neurodevelopmental or chronic disease outcomes (except for asthma and allergies). No vax-unvax study has ever looked at utism ADHD etc. All the alleged vax-unvax studies have severe problems that render the results irrelevant to the CDC vaccine schedule and how vaccines are used today.

I've seen your "rebuttal" before and laughed. Part of the reason is that, yes, such studies have problems, but for some reason you seem to think the Mawson study as having "strengths and weaknesses" (as you put it in the comments) when in fact it has zero strengths that I've been able to find and glaring weaknesses that make it so bad that it's basically useful for nothing more than lining a bird cage. As for bias, you seem oblivious to the bias in the Mawson study. As for the third study, I like Matt Carey's take on it:

The Mawson study has a few strengths that make it unique:
1) comparing fully vaccinated with zero-vaccine groups. And by fully vaccinated, I mean the US CDC schedule. Not a wimpy schedule with just a few vaccines. There is a large difference in vaccine exposure in the compared groups. None of the vax-unvax studies you cite (via the thoughtscapism blog) do this.

2) Looking at a variety of long term neurodevelopmental and immune outcomes. None of the thoughtscapism-cited studies do this either.

3) Good matching on socioeconomic status and income. The Bloom (Philippines) study is terrible in this regard. That all subjects were homeschooled adds to the matching.

4) The substantial size of the study. 666 subjects isnt too shabby. The KIGGS study had only 50 subjects with zero vaccines age 6+. The bloom study had only 85 fully vaccinated subjects.

Of course I agree there are weaknesses, like the fact is a survey and that parents were not interviewed. But I you have not explained in detail why this is such a fatal problem. All studies have weaknesses and I just dont see how the survey issue is a big enough problem to make it as terrible as you say. You are overreacting.

HUB also explains why all the MMR-autism study results are wrong. Its a systematic source of bias that affects MMR studies particularly strongly. Thats because infants injured by the first 6 months of vaccines dont getr MMR. The parents stop vaccinating after their terrible experience. These vaccine-injured children are used as controls in the MMR studies.

"...we can be pretty sure that history repeats itself and when medical history textbooks are rewritten a long time from now, there will be names of medical heroes like Semelweiss in there, people who challenged orthodoxy and went where no one wanted to go."

I can be even more sure that medical history texts of the future will not be loaded with fulsome praise of John Brinkley (who implanted goat testes into men to improve their virility), or the people who challenged "orthodoxy" by doing wholesale lobotomies for mental illness, or the antivax quacks like Mark Geier who've inflicted chemical castration drugs on autistic boys.

"Orthodoxy" (a.k.a. evidence-based medical practice) of the future is extremely unlikely to remember Mawson and his cheerleaders kindly.

None are perfect, but there is data on that, and it will take more than a fatally flawed study to counter that.

I'm still trying to figure out the hypothesis. Unless the claim is that even one vaccine somehow does something irreversible besides generate immunity, what's the supposed difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated children?

I'm getting bored with the zombie metaphor, so I came up with one of my own.

Anti-vaccine studies are like a clown car act, where the clowns trip around trying to get the car restarted. All cheer when the car rattles off, but the car still runs into the scenery as it putters away.

While I like the imagery of a clown car to describe an antivaccine study (and indeed have referred to antivaccine blogs as "clown cars" in the past), I'm having trouble visualizing how this metaphor works... :-)

@Christine: The thing about clown cars is that they usually contain several more clowns than you would expect to fit in a car that size. Which, come to think of it, works as a metaphor for the anti-vax crowd.

It makes sense, really. Jake can't go with science, because he knows there isn't any that supports his position. He can't hang where free comments are allowed, because he's a gutless wimp who can't handle the meanies who tell him the truth. He can't turn to friends, because he's pissed off all the other AV communities so he doesn't have any (well, he has Hans and Rose, but I have no evidence they aren't socks). All he can do is stay in his safe space, and when something comes his way that shatters his little bubble, he has to defuse it the only way he knows how.

@Johnny and Science Mom: That's exactly why, if I bother to post on Jake's blog, I make sure I cross post the comment here. So that it can't be toyed with. AND...if there's a comment over there that *isn't* cross-posted here, then it's not from me, it is a sock. (Though, TBH, I can't be bothered to check out Jake's blog on any regular basis, because his writing is terrible.)

@Fake Science Mom, Does the gnat think he can draw blood with this (mis)appropriation of your nym? His readership won't know and their numbers must be frightfully small to make this sort of idiocy seem reasonable.

That comment and the others have a distinct whiff of a recently departed sock from here. Perhaps Jake can find the stones to clarify and remove those comments if he wasn't the perpetrator. Not holding my breath though.

I admit I hadn't considered that they were flat out sock-puppet entries. Knowing that Jake edits comments, I figured that was the case here. I wouldn't put it past He Who I Will Not Name As Long As He Doesn't Post Here, and I agree that Jake will probably be disinclined to do anything about it. I'd even go so far as to say that it probably brings a big grin to his face.

I missed this the first time around, but does the Mawson et al. survey really have 666 subjects? That number would be somewhat ironic, given the likely religious orientation of many of the participants.

And just to emphasize the point: Having larger numbers helps reduce the statistical errors in your result. The relative statistical error is proportional to 1/sqrt(N). But it does nothing to help your systematic errors. If your survey methodology is designed to prove your point, your results will be just as bad with N=20,000 as with N=20. Garbage in, garbage out.

I am sure this low life was just performing a study on how to change behavior in teenage girls:

In May 2017 the Chiropractic Commission charged chiropractor Derek Hayden (CH00034208) with unprofessional conduct. Charges say Hayden had a sexual relationship with a teenage patient he had been treating since she was 9-years-old. The patient allegedly lived in Hayden’s home for more than a year. Charges say the goal was to correct the patient’s behavioral problems, but Hayden lacked a license as a counselor or any other kind of mental health professional. Hayden allegedly gave her signature authority to one of his bank accounts. Hayden allegedly didn’t keep adequate records of his treatment of the patient.

Mawson's other OAText paper also de-retracted. The one on prematurity, with the eyebrow-raising report that premature birth, in the absence of vaccination, is *not* a risk factor for neurological problems.

Mawson’s other OAText paper also de-retracted. The one on prematurity, with the eyebrow-raising report that premature birth, in the absence of vaccination, is *not* a risk factor for neurological problems.

And with author affiliations still wrong.

This really does have shades of the grifters at OAText finding a way to improve their personal liquidity.

I admit I hadn’t considered that they were flat out sock-puppet entries.

My immediate reaction was that this was Travis. Jake doesn't use language like that. When he edits my comments, he does so by taking some stuff out so he doesn't have to respond to it, not completely changing the wording. Or in Becky's case, he renames her as Brian Deer.

Oh yes, the PDF has not changed; it is still date-stamped "28th April". And its temporary disappearance is not explained by the rationale offered by CMSRI for the disappearance of the vaccine / non-vaccine paper ("the editors took it down while they investigated the retraction of its earlier version in Frontiers"). Leaving us with the "ransom demand" explanation.

The Mawson study has exactly 0 strengths (actually come to think of it, there might even be negative strengths). This lack of strengths start with the way the data was gathered: by internet survey that anyone could fill in, targeted at an unrepresentative group of the population but that anyone could fill in, promoted widely among the anti-vaccine groups, where participants were encouraged to recruit other participants, and where reporting of vaccination and health conditions was completely unverified.

There is an old statistics saying, more recently co-opted by people in computers, that goes: Garbage in, garbage out. The data for the Mawson papers was garbage of the lowest order - so putrid that no one else would touch it.

Here we have the council do hard rubbish pick ups, where you put out all your large pieces of rubbish to be collected. There is a thriving scavenger business where people go and search through other people's rubbish for metal, bits of furniture that might still work and other gems before the council picks it up. Many of the piles of hard rubbish decrease significantly in size before the pick up, but not ours. It seems we put out true junk* for collection. Mawson's data set reminds me of our junk.

*We have another old saying that goes: Stuff is the junk you keep and junk is the stuff you throw away. My wife accuses me of failing to properly distinguish between junk and stuff.

These characteristics are objectively better than the KIGGS and 2 other alleged vax-unvax studies cited by Orac.

1) comparing fully vaccinated with zero-vaccine groups. And by fully vaccinated, I mean the US CDC schedule. Not a wimpy schedule with just a few vaccines. There is a large difference in vaccine exposure in the compared groups. None of the vax-unvax studies you cite (via the thoughtscapism blog) do this.

2) Looking at a variety of long term neurodevelopmental and immune outcomes. None of the thoughtscapism-cited studies do this either.

3) Good matching on socioeconomic status and income. The Bloom (Philippines) study is terrible in this regard. That all subjects were homeschooled adds to the matching.

4) The substantial size of the study. 666 subjects isnt too shabby. The KIGGS study had only 50 subjects with zero vaccines age 6+. The bloom study had only 85 fully vaccinated subjects.

ANY survey is objectively worthless as a scientific study. A survey previously advertised in the antivax swamp, where every brain-dead denizen thereof was encouraged to respond to it and lie their a$$es off--yeah, that's a strength.

Vaccine Papers, epidemiology, how much? For that matter, who were the epidemiology-trained researchers in that survey? (To call it a cross-sectional study is like calling your site an informational website.)

I've judged better 3rd grade science fair projects than the unverifiable nonsense of Mawson. A quick search on Facebook for when Mawson oh-so-unscientifically trolled for his survey participants shows posts like this from 2012 ( http://tinyurl.com/kcqwgky ) where a home school group soliciting participants notes:

No information is requested that could personally identify anyone. We are requesting only state and zip code of residence. Responses to the online questionnaire are dumped anonymously into a database from which no individual can be personally identified.

So, no way to monitor that no one is spiking the responses with fake answers, and no way to verify the reliability of what was submitted. No conclusions can be drawn from Mawson's nonsense when there are no means to verify the authenticity and reliability of responses. His work has all the validity of a Facebook poll.

VP has previously demonstrated his grasp of these concepts by using a sample-size calculator to assert that if there were not 98% an ASD risk due to vaccines (leading to N = 2000 or something similar), the jig was up.

"So, no way to monitor that no one is spiking the responses with fake answers, and no way to verify the reliability of what was submitted. No conclusions can be drawn from Mawson’s nonsense when there are no means to verify the authenticity and reliability of responses. His work has all the validity of a Facebook poll."

This is a reasonable criticism and definite weakness of the study. But does it rise to the level of justifying complete dismissal of the results?

I tend to not think so, because I dont think that hundreds of people will make up nonsense to spike a survey like this. This is some research on this issue (human behavior in survey research). From what I have read, people generally dont act this way.

A strength of the study is the large difference in vaccine exposure in the compared groups. It was FULL vs ZERO vaccination.

no other study has such a large differential in exposure. I think thats valuable.

by comparison, the Smith/Woods study often cited by vaccine promoters compared groups receiving:

10.1 vs 11.8 vaccines
7.4 vs 11.8 vaccines

its not reasonable to expect this small exposure differential will create observable effects.

Also, we dont know the dose-response curve for vaccines and adverse outcomes. For all we know, the dose-response may be relatively flat in the 7-12 vaccine range.

"VP has previously demonstrated his grasp of these concepts by using a sample-size calculator to assert that if there were not 98% an ASD risk due to vaccines (leading to N = 2000 or something similar), the jig was up."

You are referring to my analysis of the Gadad study. Please explain why I am wrong.

With an assumed 2% autism rate from vaccines, and dichotomous endpoint (autism Y or N), and conventional alpha 0.05 and 80% power, 387 monkeys per group would be needed, or 774 total. Its basic biostatistics.

Just a quick note to tell that if my comments in the last few weeks sounded depressive, that's because it dawned on me that I am. I along with my cousin have been taking... scratch that... trying to take care of a soon to be 44 years old brother who's aspie, with SMH issues, 2nd grade high school and the hyperactivity of 10 cheetah at a bare minimum.

The good part of this period of the year is that I'll be scheduled for an interview with professor Erin Barker of Concordia university for a job in her lab. She, incidentally, studies parenting stress for parents of autistic child and/or SMH issues.

Will you be writing any more articles about aluminum adjuvant? It seems you covered the Al adjuvant issue lightly in part of a post a few years ago, focusing on the ecological study by Shaw. I have not seen you address the experimental results, or new papers showing that Al is more toxic than previously believed (e.g. showing harm to animals at 3.4 mg/kg/day, a vaccine-relevant dosage).

An important new paper was published on Al adjuvant toxicity, described here:

[D]oes it rise to the level of justifying complete dismissal of the results?

I tend to not think so, because I don't think that hundreds of people will make up nonsense to spike a survey like this.

Thank you Vaccine Papers. You've just confirmed your ignorance. In a sample size as small as the one in this, you don't need "hundreds of people" to submit fake answers to skew the results. 34 would be enough to do it.
One last thing. How do we know that Mawson didn't cherry pick the answers?

1) comparing fully vaccinated with zero-vaccine groups. And by fully vaccinated, I mean the US CDC schedule. Not a wimpy schedule with just a few vaccines. There is a large difference in vaccine exposure in the compared groups. None of the vax-unvax studies you cite (via the thoughtscapism blog) do this.

There is no way of verifying that the "unvaccinated" group had received no vaccinations or that the "vaccinated" group had received any or all of the vaccinations mentioned.

2) Looking at a variety of long term neurodevelopmental and immune outcomes. None of the thoughtscapism-cited studies do this either.

There is no way of verifying that any of the children involved had, or did not have, any of the neurodevelepment and immune outcomes mentioned.

3) Good matching on socioeconomic status and income. The Bloom (Philippines) study is terrible in this regard. That all subjects were homeschooled adds to the matching.

There is no way of verifying that any of the socioeconomic status data were correct.

4) The substantial size of the study. 666 subjects isnt too shabby. The KIGGS study had only 50 subjects with zero vaccines age 6+. The bloom study had only 85 fully vaccinated subjects.

There is no way of verifying that all of the children in the study were homeschooled or lived in the four states mentioned. Indeed there was no way of verifying that these children actually existed.

ok fair enough. Since Mawson cannot prove these things didnt happen, reasonable people can disagree. I think its unlikely that the results were spiked, but thats merely an opinion based on subjective information. I think its likely that vaccines cause the adverse effects Mawson reported (in view of other science).

Are there any other vax-unvax studies I dont know about? And by vax-unvax, I mean zero vs substantial vaccine exposure comparison. Not necessarily the full schedule, but preferably pretty close, and including several aluminumn-containing vaccines. The current CDC schedule has 11 Al adjuvanted vaccines in the first 6 months, and 16 vaccines up to 2 years.

Anyone that has researched enough (and isn't a paid shill), know that unvaccinated kids are healthier than vaccinated kids. It's obvious. How do I know that we are winning this argument? This used to be one of the only places that you could go to read about the topic on an ongoing basis... Now, it's everywhere! You are losing and will be seen as frauds and morons for years to come. Congrats!

This used to be one of the only places that you could go to read about the topic on an ongoing basis… Now, it’s everywhere!

That's because years ago, most people were unaware of the existence of your mentally diseased little cult. I would mention the existence of antivaxers to people and they would be either horrified or disbelieving. It is difficult to believe that such a cabal of evil miscreants could exist, but you do, and now that the light of publicity has started shining on you, you're scurrying like the roaches you are to escape it.

I tend to not think so, because I dont think that hundreds of people will make up nonsense to spike a survey like this. This is some research on this issue (human behavior in survey research). From what I have read, people generally dont act this way.

Well, then you clearly don't get how life works when it comes to other open-ended polling activities like the TV show American Idol where fans can vote multiple times for their favorite performer--and do all the time.

And go onto Facebook and search "Vaccination Status and Health Outcomes among Homeschool Children" and look at where it popped up back in 2012 when the survey was available to anyone who had the link. That link shows up on all kinds of anti-vaccine web sites and Facebook pages with open solicitations for people to go fill it out. If you don't think AVers didn't swarm all over that like flies on dog poop, then I've got some ocean front property here in Arizona I'd like to sell you.

"Woe to you, oh Earth and sea, for the Devil sends the Beast with wrath
Because he knows the time is short
Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the Beast
For it is a human number, its number is six hundred and sixty six..."

Sorry, couldn't help myself, given the number of participants...

And to discussion at hand. @VP

I tend to not think so, because I dont think that hundreds of people will make up nonsense to spike a survey like this. This is some research on this issue (human behavior in survey research). From what I have read, people generally dont act this way.

Looking at the topic of the poll - would you agree that many people feel very strongly about the issue? I think we can agree on this point. Some, the community here would eve say most, of the people on the anti-vaccine side held rather radical beliefs, up to the government conspiracy and oppression. Even in this very discussion we have Joe, who accused everyone who does not think that unvaccinated children are obviously healther of being a shill.

Can you with any degree of certainty say, that among people who hold such strong opinions and who very much would like a study that proves them right, there are none who would falesly report in an internet poll or report multiple times?

Hell, we don't even need ideologically motivated sabotage - a bunch of trolls filling the poll for s**ts and giggles would render the whole thing worthless.

I don't understand a lot of science. But even a layman such as me can see how using only reliable data is the paramount. You wouldn't want engineers desiging next boeing to take measurements "by the eye". Or you would, if you are misantrophic enough and don't travel by plane. But I'd like to believe you wouldn't.

@Julian Frost: well, if Joe wants to believe that, then I have to wonder what my fully vaccinated AND UTD kids would have been like if we hadn't vaccinated them? Super people? They are healthy, confident, employed adults. As children, yes, they had colds, chicken pox (unfortunately the year before the vaccine was approved), GI bugs and other things we don't vaccinate against. Frequent ear infections as infants because of lousy genetics until they grew old enough for their eustachian tubes to be longer (can't blame vaccines - both my husband and his mother had the same thing at the same ages, and very different vaccine schedules).

IOW...Joe is full of it. And he insults all the very intelligent Joes I know who are also fully UTD with vaccines because I nag. :)

In the real world, reasonable people with any limited level of expertise take one look at Mawson's pair of papers and recognise them as the junk they are. Based entirely on the methodology, but there are many other clear signs elsewhere in the papers - not forgetting the fact that they were published in the most predatory of predatory open access journals. There is nothing going for these two pieces of work.

Unreasonable people make excuses for Mawson and invent fairy tales where people with a vested interest are always completely truthful on anonymous internet surveys. The fact that you are spending so much effort making excuses for this study shows that you are completely anti-vaccine and stoop to cherry pick the the most massive colossal junk in order to support your precious pre-conceived notions.

A certain trolling sock puppet generator impersonated a number of regulars, and I was forced to put them into my automatic moderation filter. I've also done this with every new commenter for the last month or so, which is unfortunate but really helped me contain the problem. (One of his tactics was to start as a new commenter making a couple of reasonable comments and then going full nutjob after being out of automatic moderation.) These measures seem to have worked. It's been a while since our troll has made an appearance (at least as far as I can tell); so I might be able to start releasing the regulars. However, I've been very, very cautious because I've been burned before, prematurely thinking he had given up and gone away.

@ VP #49: If you want reliable data on a topic like this, you need medical records. You need documentation. You see, the problem is many "unvaccinated" kids got at least one vaccine, and many vaccinated kids either didn't get them on time, or are missing a few doses not because of any BSC AV nonsense, but because some parents just don't get it done when they should. You have to control for those confounding factors, and Mawson couldn't do that with the survey because he didn't verify anything.

Even if he treated his data with integrity, as HDB suggests (not sure if he's being satirical or not), if the data is crap, the results are crap. Garbage in garbage out as someone else noted.

"I think its unlikely that the results were spiked, but thats merely an opinion based on subjective information."

And that's why your thoughts on this are garbage. You are way too credulous for a scientific discussion.

Shifting the goal posts to aluminum isn't helping your case. There have been a number of well constructed studies. They've been discussed here many times. You are being disingenuous.

“VP has previously demonstrated his grasp of these concepts by using a sample-size calculator to assert that if there were not 98% an ASD risk due to vaccines (leading to N = 2000 or something similar), the jig was up.”

You are referring to my analysis of the Gadad study.

No, I'm referring to your performance here; I don't read your site.

With an assumed 2% autism rate from vaccines, and dichotomous endpoint (autism Y or N), and conventional alpha 0.05 and 80% power, 387 monkeys per group would be needed, or 774 total.

I'm not talking about monkeys, but it doesn't matter. That's a 98% attributable risk, you bonehead.

"Thinking" of this nature is incompatible with quality research. There must be reasonable supporting evidence, not conjecture.

... when P.Z. Myers invites his readers to crash an on-line poll ...

That's another of life's little pleasures I've let slip away. I haven't participated in pharyngulating a poll in ages.
I now refuse to participate in any sort of online or telephone poll for any purpose because of how badly designed nearly all of them are. Authoring a good poll is very difficult and it's my opinion that the number of people capable of doing it is vanishingly small. I once started to complete a survey from a provincial government agency and quit a very short way in because of how bad I thought it was. I mentioned this to the agency person with whom I had regular contact and her response was to agree entirely. She was a part-time lecturer in statistics.

Note that Ref. 63 is not to the VAERS database, but to the NVIC version of it, the one that facilitates dumpster-diving by bypassing the ‘data quality’ caveats.

I took a moment to realize that NVIC was not National Vaccine Injury Compensation, but the "venerable" anti-vaccine organization of Barbara Loe Fisher, the National Vaccine Information Center. Of course they would strip away any warnings.

Some good news regarding antivaxers' attempts to frighten Somali-Americans into not having their children vaccinated.

"Local health officials are hosting forums in Columbus this week after a recent measles outbreak among Somali populations in Minnesota.

Columbus has the second-largest Somali population in the United States behind Minneapolis, and health officials fear a possible outbreak in central Ohio as families in both cities visit one another this summer...
Minnesota health officials link the high numbers of unvaccinated Somali children in their state with an aggressive campaign by anti-vaccine advocates several years ago that targeted Somali parents, saying that vaccinating their children would cause autism.

“This could happen in any community that is given misinformation,” said Jose Rodriguez, spokesman for Columbus Public Health.

Hassan Omar, executive director of the Somali Community Association of Ohio, said the community understands there are health risks. He said he hopes these events help to educate people, as well as break any stereotypes that residents might have about Somalis.

“Everybody is worried about this,” Omar said. “We don’t want there to be a stigma. We’re Americans, we’re Midwestern. We have children that are all up-to-date for vaccinations.”

To follow up on Panacea @63: There are ways you could conduct a study like this with rigor and integrity. Looking at de-identified data from a insurance providers, for example. Granted, that would still miss things like illnesses that didn't require doctor's visits, but it would all be verified. Or maybe data from CHIP?

But asking people to provide you with data to support a position that they hold dear is by the simple facts of human nature going to result in skewed data, even if no one deliberately stuffed the poll.

There is an entire field of study around how to build rigorous, consistent, accurate and reliable health surveys. the survey used in this study fails pretty much every single principle of good survey design.

Are there any other vax-unvax studies I dont know about? And by vax-unvax, I mean zero vs substantial vaccine exposure comparison. Not necessarily the full schedule, but preferably pretty close, and including several aluminumn-containing vaccines.

I suppose it's marginally amusing that ddanimal has a lopsided criterion here, in addition to failing to show back up with his slide rule* to tell everyone what 2% of 14.7/1000 is.

Re: Vaccine Paper's comments
While part of the problem with the data in Mawson's survey is that there was no attempt to validate the responses, to confirm that the responses are accurate, there are worse problems than that.
Even if the respondents were completely honest, their responses may be subject to recall errors and subjective assessments.
And going even further, even if all the responses are objectively accurate, there could still be systemic biases caused by sample selection. Let me illustrate this point a bit further.

1) Pretend for now that we are doing this in the late 80s*. Let the response variables be whether someone receives an academic scholarship ("yes", "no") and whether someone comes from an extremely rich family ("yes", "no"). The question we ask is whether or not the family background is associated with obtaining an academic scholarship. This design is analogous to the Mawson study.
2) Since the extremely rich (by whatever criteria) is only a very small proportion of the population, we decide to choose a subpopulation in which the extremely rich is over-represented, let's say the Yale freshman class (this is analogous to the choice of restricting the survey to homeschooled children).
3) We conduct the survey, tabulate the data, and find that there is a statistically significant association between family wealth and receiving an academic scholarship. Specifically, the extremely rich have lower academic scholarship rates than the non-extremely-rich.
4) We conclude that in general, people from extremely rich families are less likely to get academic scholarships.
5) Problem: A better explanation is that the extremely rich are as or more likely to receive academic scholarships, but though they receive academic scholarships at the average rate at Yale, the poor kids appear to receive academic scholarships at a higher rate because the ones who didn't had to get an education elsewhere. Consequently, you obtain a spurious result due to the choice of an unrepresentative subgroup.
6) How does this connect to the Mawson study? One possible effect of choosing homeschooled students is that parents of unvaccinated children tend to prefer to homeschool all their children, while a large proportion of parents of vaccinated children only homeschool their autistic children (due to inadequate special education services). This is all the more salient because vaccination is required (in theory) for public education.

As for your comments for the Gadad study, your reliance on the sample size calculator was inadvisable. The calculator (based on my attempts to replicate the numbers) assumes approximate normality and two-tailed test, when the underlying distribution is quite non-normal (binomial with tiny p parameter) and the appropriate alternative hypothesis is one-tailed (autism is higher in the vaccinated group than the non-vaccinated group). Making the same assumptions and using an appropriate statistical test (Fisher's Exact), I reach 80% power at around n=335 each group.
This is of course not a defence of the Gadad paper. I think it's silly. Orac thinks it's unethical (http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/09/30/three-dozen-dead-macaque-m…). What I am pointing out is that you don't know statistics as well as you think you do.

Thank you for the correction regarding the two-tailed test in the sample calculator I used for the Gadad study analysis. I edited the article accordingly. Can you link to a calculator that uses Fishers exact test?

"As for your comments for the Gadad study, your reliance on the sample size calculator was inadvisable. The calculator (based on my attempts to replicate the numbers) assumes approximate normality and two-tailed test, when the underlying distribution is quite non-normal (binomial with tiny p parameter) and the appropriate alternative hypothesis is one-tailed (autism is higher in the vaccinated group than the non-vaccinated group). Making the same assumptions and using an appropriate statistical test (Fisher’s Exact), I reach 80% power at around n=335 each group."

As for your comments for the Gadad study, your reliance on the sample size calculator was inadvisable. The calculator (based on my attempts to replicate the numbers) assumes approximate normality and two-tailed test, when the underlying distribution is quite non-normal (binomial with tiny p parameter) and the appropriate alternative hypothesis is one-tailed (autism is higher in the vaccinated group than the non-vaccinated group). Making the same assumptions and using an appropriate statistical test (Fisher’s Exact), I reach 80% power at around n=335 each group.

To detect a 2% difference from 1 in 68, I get around 2.6 million in each arm. Just sayin'.

@Narad #77
Oh, no dispute that the study was atrociously underpowered (as I said, it's silly). The first time I saw it, I was struck by how the paper failed to establish that the symptoms they were looking for actually occurred in macaques.

Unless you are talking about actual outputs from the calculator, in which case I'd check your input.

Thanks. It took a heavy handed approach by my cousin (who's headed to Cuba in a bit over an hour) to fix the situation but the basic gist is that the brother will leave me alone for the week that the cousin is in Cuba and upon his return, there will be other fixes. He fail to do that, he's out of here.

Usual scenario: I'd work on my computer, with earphones cranking out music in full blast in my ears and the brother won't stop talking to me or asking questions despite me having told him 10 times to not bother me, I'm working and not listening. It might be difficult for him to uphold his promise but today, I went to the police station.

Unless you are talking about actual outputs from the calculator, in which case I’d check your input.

You can check the input yourself. Mind you, I'm not talking about whatever Gadad-paper "analysis" that he insisted I must have been referring to, but what's needed to signal a 2% difference in ASD diagnoses.* And 80% power wouldn't cut it anyway.

* I've been through this at painful length with Vapor Genie before, which is why I feel no urge to go looking for the comments. See Genie, Vapor.

FAO Orac, rather sad this, but inevitable, baby dies on a gluten free diet, parents owned a health food business and took the child to a homeopath. Let's spread the news and hope it never happens again.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Thanks for the laugh HDB,
@Jay #82, that is so sad. And some studies have pointed out that if somebody does not have a gluten allergy, a gluten-free diet is bad because it can leave out vital nutrients.

Okay, yeah, you are taking 2% to mean a relative risk of 0.98, while VP is working with the assumption that the risk difference is 0.02. Naturally, the results are not comparable.

I would usually complain about binomial with small p is very skewed, violating the normality assumption yada yada yada, but when each outcome is expected to have at least 20,000 observations even I have to admit the deviation is going to be negligible.

What killed that poor child was his parents' self-diagnosing him as lactose-intolerant and denying him dairy. Still, it's a textbook case of parental stupidity ending in a fatality, and in a just world the homeopath would be up on charges as well.

Still, it’s a textbook case of parental stupidity ending in a fatality, and in a just world the homeopath would be up on charges as well.

Why would the homeopath be charged? In the few articles I've seen the homeopath told the parents to go see a real medical doctor. It is even mentioned in the SciBaby's "source" (the daily mail..............!).
I do not see a reason to hold the homeopath personal responsible for that death unless there is some source saying that the homeopath saw the baby before that point or knew about the baby condition.

No, I'm taking it to mean a relative risk of 2%. But anyway, as the Cubs–Brewers game was postponed for no good reason, I went looking for the original exchange with VP* for context and couldn't find it here, which leads me to think that it must have been on Disqustink, which I'm really not going to root around in.

Along the way, though, I did glance at his Gadad entry. Recall his invocation of "basic biostatistics"** above, and then get this (italics added):

"But first, we need to describe some basic statistics.

"Statistics
"Determining the number of subjects necessary in a study depends a lot on how confident you want to be in the results. Highly reliable results require more subjects, of course.

"In these types of studies, there are two kinds of errors:

"Type 1: Observing an effect when its not actually there (false positive), and
"Type 2: Not observing an effect when it really is there (false negative).

"The chance of a type 1 error is also known as the 'p-value' (also known as 'alpha'). A p-value requirement of less than 5% (p=0.05) is standard in biomedical sciences."

The actual "calculation" is just painfully stupid – it's based on the assumption that there is zero ASD prevalence "incidence" in the unvaccinated, which means that no comparator group is needed. It gets worse:

"If the vaccines caused autism in 2% monkeys, it would not have been observed in the Gadad study. The vaccines would need to cause autism in at least about 38% of the monkeys for the Gadad study to detect it."

One does not need a sample-size calculator to determine whether one's monkeys might amount to an element of ℕ. He then starts babbling about Giardia, at which point I lost interest.

Troels: homeopaths don't give valid medical advice. It's quackery ie fraud. Hence, if you are a homeopath and dispensing fake medical advice, you are contributing to poor health outcomes and should be held accountable when your patient dies from treatable medical conditions like malnutrition.

#88, I agree with anything you said.
But my point still stands.
I've only read a couple of news article about this death and the articles are probably based on the same source.
Based on the articles I’d say it is not clear how many times the homeopath saw the child. My initial reading of the articles made me think that the homeopath only saw the child once. All we know is the last time the homeopath told the parent to see a real doctor.
If that was the only time the homeopath saw the child then he/she did the right thing regardless of his/her profession. I’d agree that if the homeopath should be charged if he/she knew (or should have known) of his malnutrition before that point, or if the homeopath in anyway directly contributed to this tragedy. But at the moment I've seen very little details about the homeopath's actions, so I remain cautious in making any conclusion about the homeopath.

Correction for the above comment:
"#88, I agree with anything you said." should be "#88, I agree with everything you said."
And
"All we know is the last time the homeopath told the parent to see a real doctor." should be "All I know is the last time the homeopath saw the child he/she told the parent to see a real doctor."

I don't want to joke about such a tragic event, but I've thought the same thing when "Homeopaths without Borders" have been jetting off to some disaster scene to dose starving, homeless people with distilled water--shouldn't the homeopathic remedy for "not enough food" be "a whole cr@pload of food"?

Relative Risk is defined as P(D=1|E=1)/P(D=1|E=2), where both E (exposure) and D (disease) are divided into two categories. Let's say E=1 for Group 1 and E=2 for Group 2, then the above becomes [Group 1 Proportions]/[Group 2 Proportions], which given your inputs is 1.02. If we let E=1 for Group 2 and E=2 for Group 1, the relative risk is 0.98. There is no reasonable arrangement using the numbers you gave that would give a relative risk of 0.02.

I thought the assumption that the incidences are 0 vs 0.02 to be a bit odd too, but for all possible combinations (incidence group 1, incidence group 2) where the risk difference is 0.02, (0, 0.02) has minimal* variance. So using this assumption gives a conservative estimate of the type II error when the alternative hypothesis is Ha: p1-p2=0.02. Not that VP knew that, of course.

I stopped reading before getting to the other stuff you mentioned, being more interested in figuring out how the calculator arrived at the number it did (answer: by ignoring the invalidity of its assumptions).

*Sketch of proof:
Assuming X and Y are two stochastically independent random variables, var(X-Y)=var(X)+var(Y).
Now, suppose X' is the number of individuals with the outcome of interest in a given arm of study, then X' has binomial distribution with parameters n (number of individuals in the arm) and p (an unknown constant between 0 and 1, inclusive). X' has variance np(1-p). This sufficient when dealing with raw outcome numbers, as when the arms of the study are balanced, but people tend to prefer working with proportions for some reason, so let X=X'/n be the random variable representing the proportion of people with the given outcome in this arm, var(X)=p(1-p)/n. For any fixed value of n>0, var(X) has global minimums when p is restricted to the interval [0,1] when p=0 or p=1 (var(X) viewed as a function of p is a parabola with a global maximum at p=0.5).
It is obvious that the way to get both p1 and p2 as close to 0 as possible while fixing their difference at 0.02 is to have one of them at 0 and the other at 0.02. Alternatively, you could have one at 1 and the other at 0.98 and get the same var(X).
Quod erat demonstrandum.

"So using this assumption gives a conservative estimate of the type II error when the alternative hypothesis is Ha: p1-p2=0.02. Not that VP knew that, of course."

I was well aware of this, which is why I assumed 0 incidence in the control group. The assumptions I made were intended to be simple and conservative. You can quibble with the details, but they are inconsequential to the conclusion: that the Gadad study was extremely underpowered, and the results are therefore meaningless.

The obvious fatal flaws of the Gadad study have not stopped vaccine promoters like Offit from declaring the Gadad results as "CLEAR AND DEFINITIVE" .

Offit wrote this last year about Gadad:

"The vaccine–autism controversy teaches us that, although it is easy to scare people, it is much harder to unscare them. Even with papers as clear and definitive as that by Gadad et al. (1), it is hard to unring the bell."-Dr Paul Offit

Relative Risk is defined as P(D=1|E=1)/P(D=1|E=2), where both E (exposure) and D (disease) are divided into two categories. Let’s say E=1 for Group 1 and E=2 for Group 2, then the above becomes [Group 1 Proportions]/[Group 2 Proportions], which given your inputs is 1.02.

The invalidating factor of Mawson's study is that by not cross-referencing with medical records, they were not able to establish an actual cohort of unvaccinated children.

Most parents who decline vaccinations are unaware that their child has had one out of the three Hep B's; the "birth" dose.

Sometimes after the childbirth the nurse will mention the Hep B "will" be given.

Usually they just say; "We need to get baby cleaned up, get some measurements & we'll bring him right back to you!"

In my state, HepB is on all standing orders in all birth centers, for all doctors since at least 1994. It does not matter if baby is born in the car on the way, they will get HepB upon arrival. Home birth with certified Mid-wife? Yes; HepB. Written, notarized "birth plan" submitted to doctor at first visit? Yes; HepB (firstly, you don't give baby care instructs to the OB & secondly; nurses administer immunizations & nurses flip straight to doctors orders in chart for a newborn admission. "Legal" has it's own section & only DNR's go to front).

You would have to be very detailed in order to form a truly UN-vaccinated group.

The Lewin's group study(which did not show similar results) utilized EHR's but integration of EHR's & IIS's vary by state so you still have discrepancies.

After establishing a true unvaccinated cohort, I personally wouldn't consider a study that eliminated subjects based on any confounding variable other than those listed on the CDC's " “General Recommendations on Immunization: Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices", as a contraindication for immunization.

That would include PROM, prematurity, sibling history of anaphylaxis to vaccine, family history of SIDS, TB, etc ... If you administer to that population ... you include that population. But that's just me.

The invalidating factor of Mawson’s study is that by not cross-referencing with medical records, they were not able to establish an actual cohort of unvaccinated children.

Most parents who decline vaccinations are unaware that their child has had one out of the three Hep B’s; the “birth” dose.

That is in fact one of the least of the problems in Mawson's study. However, it does point to another absurdity in Mawson's hypothesis.

Among all the other problems with the hypothesis is the implicit assumption that all vaccines are identical. We know this is not the case, so the whole totally unvaccinated versus totally vaccinated study as a hypothesis is not supported by the existing information about vaccines.

But then as it ever was among the anti-vaccine groups, it is all about the vaccines. Not a specific vaccine, but vaccines in general.

After establishing a true unvaccinated cohort, I personally wouldn’t consider a study that eliminated subjects based on any confounding variable other than those listed on the CDC’s ” “General Recommendations on Immunization: Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices”, as a contraindication for immunization.

That is why you won't be asked to develop protocols for any epidemiological studies.

@#46 VP says I have not seen you address the experimental results, or new papers showing that Al is more toxic than previously believed (e.g. showing harm to animals at 3.4 mg/kg/day, a vaccine-relevant dosage).
Since the average daily dietary intake of Al is considerably higher than that received via vaccination, one has to wonder about that finding...

Compare this to aluminum absorption (for infants) over the first 6 months from milk and formula. The total amount ingested must be multiplied by 0.3% to obtain the amount actually absorbed into the body.

Putting aside anything else, you're assuming that absorption from an IM injection is 100%. There's no basis for that. Here is a very detailed scientific discussion of this, and he points out that in the study that examined blood concentration of IM aluminum injection estimated bioavailability at 17% - and the basis for that.

What state is that? Because standing order or no standing order, you are still required to obtain informed consent from the patient (or the parent) and give them a vaccine information sheet PRIOR to administering any vaccine.

Also, the parents should be given the immunization record card to take to their pediatrician's office so they can see what vaccines were given and when, so the child can be kept on schedule. Nurses are required to document the manufacturer, lot number, and expiration date of the vaccine on this card when they administer the vaccine.

Every parent should know what vaccines their kid got. If they don't, then there's a breakdown in the system in your area, or they're just really poor record keepers and threw away or lost the card.

@Panacea: yeah, christine is pulling facts out of her posterior again. There is no place (at least in the US) where a Hep B vaccine is given without a signed consent. And if you didn't give consent, you had to sign that, too. As a nurse and as a midwife, I can say without any qualms that she's full of inaccuracies.

"...once aluminum is in the bloodstream, it is processed
similarly regardless of the source. Approximately 90 percent is processed by binding to a protein called transferrin, and about 10 percent is bound by citrate. Once bound, the majority of aluminum will be eliminated through the kidneys, a small amount through bile, and a small amount is retained in tissues of the body. About half of the aluminum in the bloodstream is eliminated in less
than 24 hours and more than three-quarters is eliminated within two weeks. The ability of the body to rapidly eliminate aluminum accounts for its excellent record of safety."

@ VP #103. You don't multiply by 0.3% to compare oral vs injected. You look at bioavailability as much as absorption.

In any case aluminum is readily eliminated renally by patients with healthy renal function. So when you look at aluminum as part of vaccines, you don't stack the dose from one vaccination on top of all the ones before, because that aluminum has long been excreted by the time of the next dose. It's not like arsenic. Actual aluminum exposure is nothing like what you're trying to say.

The 3 problems with Mitkus are:
1) The MRL used by Mitkus is derived from feeding experiments, not injected Al adjuvant experiments.
2) Mitkus uses a proposed NOAEL of 26 mg/kg/day, but it is not a NOAEL. More recent science shows harm from ingestion of 3.4 mg/kg/day.
3) Mitkus assumes Al adjuvant particles have zero toxicity. There is no evidence for this, and much evidence it is wrong.

I agree with Vaccine Papers that Mitkus 2011 is flawed and addresses only a fraction of the safety problems associated with aluminum adjuvanted vaccines.

My review of Mitkus 2011:

Dr. Mitkus,

I was reviewing aluminum safety information for vaccines at the FDA website and found your study.1

You provide the following description of the effect of aluminum adjuvants on the immune system.

“Aluminum adjuvants are important components of vaccines, since they stimulate the immune system to respond more effectively to protein or polysaccharide antigens that have been adsorbed to the surface of insoluble aluminum particles. Specifically, these coated particles are phagocytized by cells of the innate immune system (e.g., macrophages) and activate intracytoplasmic sensors of pathogen-associated molecular patterns located within the cells, such as the nucleotide-binding domain leucine-rich repeat-containing family of sensors ([6]; Schroder and Tschopp [30]). The functional consequence of activation of this intracellular system is the activation of certain enzymatic caspases that cleave pro-interleukin (IL)-1β to interleukin (IL)-1β. The secretion of the mature cytokine, IL-1β, leads to an inflammatory reaction and a downstream Th2-dependent antibody response [7], which amplify the immune response to the antigen. Adjuvanted aluminum, therefore, plays a vital role in facilitating the response that underlies the immunoprotection afforded by vaccines.”

The rest of the paper focuses on body burden of aluminum AFTER it is absorbed from the muscle into the blood.

I was taken aback that you have COMPLETELY IGNORED any negative immunological effects that aluminum can have while it is still in the muscle.

The quoted paragraph above assumes that the only proteins in the vaccine are viral/bacterial proteins. In that case, as you state, the stimulation by aluminum plays a vital role in generating immunoprotection.

But obviously, vaccines contain numerous other proteins including food proteins (ovalbumin, milk, soy, yeast, etc.)2 , culture medium cell proteins (Vero monkey kidney cell proteins, calf serum proteins, WI38/MRC5 fibroblast cell proteins, etc.) that are also adsorbed to the surface of insoluble aluminum particles. As you state then, aluminum adjuvants stimulate the immune system to respond more effectively to ALL these proteins as well. The effect is an immune response that includes synthesis of antibodies against any and all of these proteins. The result of such a response of course includes food allergy3,4,5 and autoimmunity6.

How can you perform a safety assessment of aluminum in vaccines by COMPLETELY IGNORING this effect?

"In any case aluminum is readily eliminated renally by patients with healthy renal function. So when you look at aluminum as part of vaccines, you don’t stack the dose from one vaccination on top of all the ones before, because that aluminum has long been excreted by the time of the next dose. It’s not like arsenic. Actual aluminum exposure is nothing like what you’re trying to say."

But that all doesn't matter. In the anti-vaccine world, reason and science is to be misinterpreted and misused. Only their logic works, and they mock anyone who is actually educated and an expert. "Yeah, I don't have a science degree," they'll say. "But I've done my research." They're the same people who think they could fly and land a plane without any training if they are given the chance to look at some YouTube videos.

Bioavailability.
You have heard of it I trust?
What is the bioavailability of aluminium compounds injected into muscle?
(Hint, it's not 100%)
Try Flarend's paper for enlightenment.

And I also notice you compared with human breastmilk, but not with formula milk or soyabased milk. (Now why would that possibly be, except to try and deceive readers into thinking only a comparison with breast milk's [lower] levels of aluminum is appropriate?)

Multiple studies like the one above have shown that aluminum injected into muscles persists for months at the site of injection. We are not interested in the amount of aluminum that enters circulation, as much as how much is left behind in the muscle, for how long and the immunotoxic effect of that persistence.

The fact that aluminum adjuvants make vaccines work, is the proof that aluminum adjuvants cause damage.

Today's vaccines contain relatively large quantities of a few poorly immunogenic target proteins and small quantities of thousands of contaminant proteins. So the immune system has to be fooled into treating the target proteins as pathogens. Aluminum injection does the necessary tissue damage thus boosting the immune response. However, the immune pathways activated by aluminum are not fully understood and are not the same pathways activated by a real infection. The result is the immune system's highly evolved intricately balanced response is replaced by a desirable disease-protecting vaccine target protein response + an undesirable contaminant protein response that causes allergy, asthma, autism and autoimmunity.

From Narad's link to Christine Kincaid's blog (who weirdly doesn't capitalise proper nouns like her name but does so with common nouns that aren't in German). Ms. Kincaid, perhaps you would like to tell me how this study will be conducted with sample power, effect measure, confounder control, etc. Vaccine Papers here seems to have a bit of difficulty with that hence the topic shift...again.

@108 I don't have "healthy renal function." In fact, I can't take Gaviscon which is the only thing that helps with Prednisone caused heartburn, but I will still get that flu shot every year because I'm old, and familiar with flu, and choose to try to avoid it, even with the tiny amount of aluminum that will stay with me until death. It makes sense to me - and to all my doctors, including my nephrologist.

The 3 problems with Mitkus are:
1) The MRL used by Mitkus is derived from feeding experiments, not injected Al adjuvant experiments.
2) Mitkus uses a proposed NOAEL of 26 mg/kg/day, but it is not a NOAEL. More recent science shows harm from ingestion of 3.4 mg/kg/day.
3) Mitkus assumes Al adjuvant particles have zero toxicity. There is no evidence for this, and much evidence it is wrong.

@Ellie: while Im glad you've been getting the 'flu vaccine, you haven't been getting any with aluminium-based adjuvants. (Not that there'd have been reason to worry if you had.)

If you're 65YO+ and in the US, FLUAD™ is the first adjuvanted seasonal 'flu vaccine, approved in late '15 (and as early as 1997, in 38 other countries). Its adjuvant is squalene- based. The other 'flu vaccine for seniors, FluZone High Dose, is not adjuvanted (like all other seasonal 'flu vaccines), but delivers significantly more vaccine antigens.

@Narad: I noticed that Ms Kincaid's post comprises her comment on JB Handley's post. Amusing that he refers VP as "a group of scientists", with ebullient praise. It seems the royal "we" was not such an ineffective strategy for a one-man-band after all, at least for some audiences.

Al adjuvant is not eliminated by kidneys. It comprises PARTICLES, which are biopersistent and remain in the body for years, causing inflammation wherever they go. And they travel into the brain, where they cause inflammation. This is how Al adjuvant causes autism and other brain injuries.

Could you please explain how the adjuvant particles not only "travel into the brain" but also travel back in time to cause the developmental changes that begin in utero, months or years before the administration of the postnatal vaccines that anti-vaxxers have long blamed for autism?

Al adjuvant particles are carried to the brain by macrophages. macrophages travel to the brain in response to receiving a signal from MCP-1, macrophage chemotactic protein, which is produced by brain microglia in response to inflammation (even peripheral inflammation).

#121 "vaccine papers" best of luck communicating science to these folks. They are mostly in the medical profession and have been trained to think what they think just like soldiers in the army . TRAINED not educated. big difference, They wont give an inch. Their days are numbered their belief in pharmaceutical mysticism is quickly being eroded. God help them when it all comes crashing down. Its a blind spot.

Vaccine research is at best a primitive science, because it involves injecting into the bloodstream foreign substances, chemical and genetic, that would not otherwise naturally enter the body. When we bring into the equation the enormous amount of known and unknown genetic material and foreign proteins that vaccines introduce into the body, and then consider the rapid increase in epidemics raging through the American population – adult diabetes in children, large numbers of various inflammatory and immune deficiency diseases, asthma and new allergies, severe gastrointestinal disorders (e.g., leaky gut syndrome and Crohn's disease), chronic fatigue syndrome, and many different neurological disorders (e.g., autism, ADD and ADHD, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's) –

We must step back and reconsider their causes. We should avoid the kind of faith that the vaccine industrial complex has in its determinist, reductionist perspective of genetic materialism to find these answers without taking into account the bombardment of toxic chemicals such as vaccine adjuvants and preservatives, extraneous genetic material, pathogenic organisms, and foreign genetic fragments that assault our bodies from shortly after birth into old age.

That's quite a funny response, given that it comes from someone who just upthread stated that aluminum adjuvant particles travel to the brain and cause autism--which has "never been proven" and which, of course, cannot explain how the adjuvant particles might magically affect brain development months before vaccination.

It can be useful to understand something of gene expression and developmental biology. The free, full-text version of a recent Nature Neuroscience article linked below might serve as a reasonable startiing point, if you note that "transcriptome expression data implicates early fetal and midfetal stages of the developing human brain in ASD etiology."

Aluminum adjuvant causes autism by inducing brain inflammation and the cytokine IL-6 specifically. Autism is becain damage caused by chronic or excessive inflammation during brain development. Can occur during gestation or postnatally. but most cases today occur postnatally, from vaccines.

2) Mitkus uses a proposed NOAEL of 26 mg/kg/day, but it is not a NOAEL. More recent science shows harm from ingestion of 3.4 mg/kg/day.

They do no such thing. Please cite your "more recent science".

3) Mitkus assumes Al adjuvant particles have zero toxicity. There is no evidence for this, and much evidence it is wrong.

They do no such thing. Please cite your evidence of harm from Al adjuvants and I'm not going to your site; you can explain it just fine here since you decided to show up. It's almost as if you expect that we haven't read these papers.

Mitkus used Priest and Flarend for KINETICS data only. For the toxicity data, Mitkus used a single feeding study (Golub 2001, as cited by the AYSDR 2008 report on Al). Golub reported that 26 mg/kg/day is a NOAEL, which us wrong. More recent science shows animals are harmed by 3.4, 4, 5.6, 6, 10 and 20 mg/kg/day aluminum ingestion.

So the Mitkus MRL curve is wrong by at least a factor of 7.6.

So you refuse to look at any information that challenges your beliefs? No wonder you get everything wrong!

If they’re so toxic, why don’t they kill the macrophages before they magically arrive at the brain to deliver their sinister payload?

Because macrophages don't have brainz or immune systems and aluminium is only toxic to brainz or immune systems or both depending on the day of the week and what Mr. Vaccine Papers website thought he read in the literature last month.

VP: "Autism does not begin in utero. Thats never been proven. Correlation is not causation."

And yet actual science has discovered at least half of the genetic sequences that cause autism, and they are striving to find the rest. This is why there is a call out for fifty thousand families to participate in this study:https://sparkforautism.org/

If you swallow it, it's ingested. SO 100% enters the body. Simple concept. Apparently no concept is simple enough for you, though.

You claim that only .3% of ingested aluminum is absorbed by the body. I assume you're pulling this figure out of your butt, but aluminum that sits around in the muscle at the injection site is going to be absorbed even less efficiently.

The elephant in the room is that there is no way to avoid aluminum. It's 8% of the Earth's crust. Every lungful of air is loaded with aluminum-containing PARTICLES!!!!! that will be absorbed a lot more easily by capillaries in the lungs than in muscle tissue.

The argument that the injury occurs in utero is based on unsupported assumptions, and is contradicted by better quality evidence showing the brain can be unjured by inflammation postnatally.

For example, Hotez and other have argued that cortical layer disruption must happen in utero because this is mostly when these layers form. Well, thats not totally true (layers continue to form postnatally), and its a bad assumption that layers cannot be disrupted by subsequent inflammation occurring during developing. Its an assumption without evidence.

While some cases of autism are definitely the result of gestational injury , the evidence clearly indicates this is not the case for all (or most) cases.

The human brain develops intensely postnatally. The brain is vulnerable to immune activation/cytokine injury during development. In particular, synaptogenesis is MORE intense in the postnatal period, and disruption of synapse formation is definitely involved in autism.

"in the first months of life, this basic mechanism of social adaptive action--eye looking--is not immediately diminished in infants later diagnosed with ASD; instead, eye looking appears to begin at normative levels prior to decline."

Cow's milk contaminated Tdap is administered to every pregnant woman to protect the newborn against pertussis. As described in the article below, Tdap can cause the synthesis of folate receptor autoantibodies (FRAA).

Such maternal FRAA bind to folate receptors in the fetal brain, block folate uptake and affect brain development. Similarly, they can also block folate uptake to the fetal thyroid gland and affect thyroid development.

Maternal FRAA in breast milk can continue the damage in the newborn. A vaccine schedule with numerous cow's milk contaminated vaccines can cause the child to begin synthesizing FRAA.

So Mom can synthesize FRAA. The child can synthesize FRAA. Or both. This can explain the spectrum in Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Maternal FRAA associated ASD may be mistaken as having a genetic origin when in fact vaccines are still to blame.

Would the following preventive measures help until the vaccines are cleaned up?

Pregnant women should be tested for FRAA and IgE to folate receptor protein.

If positive, they should avoid cow's milk to reduce FRAA levels.

Folinic acid treatment for pregnant/lactating women?

Delay administering cow's milk contaminated vaccines to the newborn until cow's milk is introduced in the diet? Thus reducing the risk of synthesizing IgE (and eventually FRAA) to cow's milk proteins.

Thyroid dysfunction in children with autism spectrum disorder is associated with
folate receptor alpha autoimmune disorder

The evidence that autism is primarily genetic is very weak. its a gene-environment interaction. Autism is rare without the environmental exposure (usually vaccines).

The "its genetic" argument is based on twin studies. but the twin studies are based on a bad assumption: that there are no gene-environment (GXE) interactions in autism. In order for the twin studies to calculate the genetic and environmental contributions to risk, it must be assumed that GXE interactions are not present. If GXE interactions are present, they falsely inflate the genetic/heritablity estimate.

“In basic twin models, gene–environment interactions are assumed not to exist, and if present, they are included as part of the additive genetic variance, inflating heritability estimates.”

“In some contexts, gene–environment interactions, i.e., that environments modify the effects of genes on the trait being studied, may account for a substantial part of the apparent heritability.”
quotes from:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22934540

The key word from the publication in question is decline, not deteriorate, don't try to twist word please. An alternative explanation to aluminum can be explained by perceptual functioning, namely enhanced perceptual functioning (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=search&term=Mottron+L) in which case, the neonate wouldn't just focus on the eyes but other features in the environment and I would be very curious about your answer, VP, to that and how the h*ll, aluminum is supposed to enhance perceptual functioning given that the bellcurve (you do know about statistics) properly emulate random events (i.e. by your tangent, aluminum is not neuron specific) yet, enhanced perceptual functioning is nowhere near a random effect; it is neuron and brain area specific.

Given that VP made the hysterical claim that autism *can begin* as late at 10-11 years old (totally ignoring the diagnostic criteria required), I'll take anything posted by them with many, many grains of salt.

BTW...how did we end up with the unholy trinity of VP, MJD and VA all posting their own Idee fixe on one blog post?

You claim that only .3% of ingested aluminum is absorbed by the body. I assume you’re pulling this figure out of your butt, but aluminum that sits around in the muscle at the injection site is going to be absorbed even less efficiently.

The literature quotes the 0.3% figure.

The figure for bioavailability from vaccine injection into muscle is 17%, so larger, but over 28 days. However, there is a lot more exposure by ingestion than by vaccination.

Added to this there has been 80 years of use of aluminium adjuvants in vaccines and somehow they have only been causing autism for the last 15 years once thiomersal was removed. It is truly magic.

BTW…how did we end up with the unholy trinity of VP, MJD and VA all posting their own Idee fixe on one blog post?

The bit I like is how they have all been congratulating each other on their insights, despite the three theses being completely at odds. It has been a nice little illustration of crank magnetism writ small.

Unfortunately, I know. It's a friggen game of whack-a-mole but see my comment on our host today's post. An "interesting" side effect of such a proposal would be never ending "fun" playing whack-a-mole with them.

“On the DSM-IV symptom checklist for autistic disorder, he met all the criteria for autism except the onset criterion because he did not have a history of any symptoms before three years of age.”

The authors state that this case “… provides further evidence that autistic symptoms can sometimes emerge after the age of three years following an external event such as an infection.”

The age 3 diagnostic requirement is arbitrary. Its not based on any mechanistic understanding of the injury.

Autism is brain injury caused by inflammation and cytokines. The brain becomes less vulnerable to injury with maturation. Children over age 3 can experience the same injury from inflammation as younger children.

And I am specific about how they relate to autism (Al injection>Al transport to brain>IL-6 in brain> autism). I make detailed, falsifiable claims, and I show my reasoning. I dont hide the ball. I dont make vague assertions. I dont make dozens of superficial claims without reasing (thats a true gish gallop).

So I say you avoid my arguments because you do not know how to refute them.

Oh, So that body of knowledge here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=search&term=Mottron+L does not exist? You need to take a stronger look because the subject described by that aforementioned body of knowledge are indeed autistic and it was found that they have increased perceptual functioning. Let me explain that again VP, autism == enhanced perceptual functioning

"Added to this there has been 80 years of use of aluminium adjuvants in vaccines and somehow they have only been causing autism for the last 15 years once thiomersal was removed. It is truly magic."

Dosage of Al adjuvant from vaccines increased enormously during the 1990s, when the autism epidemic exploded.

other factors contribute, like vitamin D deficiency for example.

Al adjuvant has never been shown to be neurologically safe in EMPIRICAL studies. The safety studies (e.g. Mitkus) are garbage and not look at neurological outcomes. Further, the Mitkus analysis is not based on ANY empirical safety/toxicity data for Al adjuvant. Mitkus only uses toxicity data for INGESTED aluminum lactate (from a SINGLE study-Golub 2001).

In autism, there is an excitatory/inhibitory synapse imbalance, in favor of excitation. It may be that in early development, the excess of excitation produces increased sensitivity to stimuli. Is this what you are referring to? Is your "increased functioning" the result of excess excitation?

Interesting results there. Impossible to know if the improved visual reasoning is caused by the cause of autism (inflammation) or is a result of the genes that confer autism risk (via GXE interaction with vaccines).

There was an article yesterday that intelligence-associated genes are also associated with autism. So the visual performance results may be because the genes that confer autism risk, also provide improved visual reasoning. Impossible to know the causal connections.

Not at all, look at my link again because this is the search result for 128 publications with over 4/5 of them on enhanced perceptual functioning by the same PI, Laurent Mottron. Obviously, this is not the only body of knowledge on enhanced perceptual functioning (other groups are investigating that hypothesis) but this one is the most familiar to me, I worked for the PI.

OK i get it. Autism is associated with enhanced visual reasoning, according to these tests. Thats interesting, but does not mean much in the present discussion. Why are you citing this?

if your point is that there is no way aluminum could cause this, I disagree. The mechanism for autism causation is inflammation. And inflammation causes many changes in how the brain develops, connectivity etc. Most changes are pathological. But I certainly would never argue that absolutely 100% of the changes caused by high inflammation in the brain are pathological according to every measurement test.

"Is there any randomized trial of delaying vaccines in high risk babies?"

No. This is the type of study thats needed. The results would put an end to this ongoing tragic failure of orthodox medicine.

the medical establishment is terrified of facing he blame for the autism epidemic and epidemic of vaccine injury, so they oppose well-designed research into vaccine injury.. But science and truth cannot be stopped forever.

Orthodox medicine will be deeply ashamed and embarrassed when the truth is known.

Mitkus used Priest and Flarend for KINETICS data only. For the toxicity data, Mitkus used a single feeding study (Golub 2001, as cited by the AYSDR 2008 report on Al). Golub reported that 26 mg/kg/day is a NOAEL, which us wrong. More recent science shows animals are harmed by 3.4, 4, 5.6, 6, 10 and 20 mg/kg/day aluminum ingestion.

No, Mitkus et al. (sec. 2.4) used the ATSDR Tox Profile 2008 (which consists of several studies) to establish MRL and pharmacokinetics are intrinsically tied to availability, excretion and deposition. By all means cite your evidence of harms with the figures you posited.

So the Mitkus MRL curve is wrong by at least a factor of 7.6.

Prove it. Show your evidence here; I'm not going to your site.

So you refuse to look at any information that challenges your beliefs? No wonder you get everything wrong!

No, I refuse to bring this to your crank site. You came here making the claims, you show the evidence.

Mitkus’s modeling only considers the toxicity of DISSOLVED Al3+ released by the particles. The toxicity of the particles is not considered or discussed.

Ooooo the particles. Toxicity was already established so whatever you're on about is outside the scope of the Mitkus et al. paper. You have still yet to establish your claim as well as tell me the order of tissue distribution of aluminium.

@VP: autism is a developmental delay not inflammation of the brain, TBI, or anything else. You posted a paper from 2002. While the first author has a respectable CV, I don't see any publications on THIS subject more recent that about 2005. I assume he's moved beyond that theory in those years.

"The key phrase there is “enhanced reasoning”, which would appear to refute your conjecture that autism is a brain injury."

enhanced VISUAL reasoning, according to the specific test.

Autism is very clearly a brain injury and pathological, even if by some measures they perform better.

As I pointed out, we dont know if the enhancement is due to the autism, or merely associated with it (e.g. the enhancement may be because the genes that confer autism risk also improve visual reasoning).

Schizophrenia is also associated with some enhancements in visual performance tasks.

@Vaccine Papers #196, I had a look at the paper you referenced.
1) It dates back to 2005. Please use something more up to date.
2) Sample size.

Brain tissues from cerebellum, midfrontal, and cingulate gyrus obtained at autopsy from 11 patients with autism were used for morphological studies. Fresh-frozen tissues available from seven patients and CSF from six living autistic patients were used for cytokine protein profiling.

"If that’s what he considered to be the “seminal” work, no wonder he’s delusional."

The vargas paper has been cited by 339 other papers. its one of the most highly cited papers in the autism literature. It stimulated huge interest in brain inflammation in autism. Its definitely seminal and very important.

Instead of relying on a single paper about enhanced visual reasoning for which you provided the situation, how about you look at the 128 papers I mentioned and which also, refute your hypothesis of brain damage?

"how about you look at the 128 papers I mentioned and which also, refute your hypothesis of brain damage?"

Im not going to dig through 128 papers to find support for your argument. Thats your job. You are making a GISH GALLOP. I looked at a number of them and did not immediately see that all of them reported enhancements.

What enhancements occur other than visual reasoning in the specific test mentioned in that paper I identified?

False accusation. I provide the evidence against your hypothesis of autism being brain damage. There is also auditory enhancements and better results on the Raven Standard progressive matrix including in neuroimaging beside faster response time.

Now if you won't go read that evidence, you have no business or any grounding to say that autism is a result vaccine injuries.

The authors of that small study are mortified by how it has been co-opted and completely abused by cranks like you leading to parents shovelling Rx anti-inflammatories and anti-virals into their autistic children. No, there is not "widespread, intense and chronic inflammation in the brains of autistic people." And no there are not "lots of studies on this." Not surprised ignorant attention-whores like you just make things up though.

There is PLENTY of science richly demonstrating the brain injury present in autism. its preposterous to say autism is not a brain injury. Just shows a complete ignorance of the literature. Not interested in debating this point.

There are so many pathologies in autism: inflammation, impaired methylation, oxidative stress, cogntiive impairments, immune dysfunction. And there are many associations with other disorders: autoimmunity and allergy are examples.

The scientific literature does not often specifically describe it as pathological, because it does not need to. Everyone knows that chronic inflammation is pathological.

Orthodox medicine faces the blame for the epidemic of vaccine brain injury known as autism. Thats why they want to shift the blame to things like genes, and pretend like its not really a problem. Politics, not science, is driving opinions about autism in the medical community.

"No, there is not “widespread, intense and chronic inflammation in the brains of autistic people.”"

CITATION NEEDED.

Every study ever done on this question has reported the same thing: widespread, intense and chronic inflammation in the autistic brain.

And, a study of several dozen autistic brains is a good size study. Very difficult to obtain human autistic brain samples and analyze them. You are expecting/demanding a study of THOUSANDS of brains? Really?

The Vargas 2005 study looked at dozens of cytokines and inflammatory markers in numerous brain regions separately, in controls and autistics. That study was a huge amount of work.

Its not reasonable to demand such an impossibly high level of evidence.

You responded to DB's citation of a study that suggested that lesions in the brains of people with autism arose early in gestation by stating that "cortical layers continue to form postnatally." Uh huh.

In response to a citation of work that involved the comparison of whole exome sequencing data from over 80,000 individuals, you indicated that you don't like twin studies. Got it.

"In response to a citation of work that involved the comparison of whole exome sequencing data from over 80,000 individuals, you indicated that you don’t like twin studies. "

The claims of high heritability are based on the twin studies, not the genome sequencing studies, because genome sequencing has failed to provide evidence that its highly heritable. There are hundreds of genes associated with autism, most with weak association. That indicates its NOT a genetic disorder. Its a gene-environment interaction.

Of which, I personally read over 2000 of them at a rate of 50 per day ;) While attending my undergrad study...and doing my usual daily chores.

That said, I'm perusing the list of 128 article I provided to VP to trim that down to a readable list...if only VP would give me the number of publication for his / her evidence that autism is brain damage...Will I be waiting? :)

To answer your question, for our paper, we did an exhaustive search for papers (which in our case, was over 7000 papers needing screening and assessment). I want to know if the list of papers on your website is as complete as possible and how many there is? Your website doesn't specify the number of papers you have there. I want a number.

oooohhhh....Now that doesn't support your argument that there is massive evidence of brain damage if you are not even able to count the number of papers on your website which is the bare minimum task to do if one want to be considered a scientist. Did you even read them?

I will mention it again, the enhanced perceptual functioning and associated hypothesis (Markram et al. at least but there are other) goes against your hypothesis that autism is a result of brain damage. Furthermore, IQ range of autistic peoples goes from mental disability range (not testable) to over 150 IQ point score (98th percentile on the RSPM) which argue against brain damages.

Of course, there can be inflammation in autistic brain but that can be present in the normal brain too (fever among others), that is not, automatically brain damages. Furthermore, there is evidence from, at a minimum, the lab I was working in of excellent memory (we also studied autistic savants for which, the epidemiology is 1/5 autistic subjects having savants abilities compared to the general population rate of 1%).

Which again, goes against brain damage. Yes, autism is a pathology (a social one and sometime, a language one) but that doesn't mean brain damage.

While VP insists that "every" study on the question reveals that there's widespread chronic inflammation in the brains of those with autism, VP ignores that such inflammation to some extent may be the _consequence_ and not the cause of autism.

If we accept the idea that inflammation causes autism, then VP will have to continue doing a dance around evidence that autism begins during gestation and inflammatory changes in utero could have a causative role.

"Autism likely begins in the womb, during brain formation, and animal studies indicate that layer formation in the fetal brain may be damaged by inflammation in the mother. A study published in February 2014 followed 1.2 million pregnancies in Finland. Researchers measured the women's levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a well-established measure of inflammation. They found that the risk of autism in the children of women with the highest levels of CRP was 43 percent higher than in those of the women with the lowest levels."

"Other studies have begun to show that mothers who have certain pro-inflammatory conditions are at greater risk of having children with autism—these conditions include rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, celiac disease, diabetes, and obesity. Women with autoimmune diseases are more likely to produce "antibrain antibodies," which can attack the brain tissue of a fetus. Women who have an infection during pregnancy may also be at increased risk of having children with autism.
These studies suggest that measuring inflammation in pregnant women may help identify those children most at risk for developing an ASD and help get them early intervention."

Note that last part about infection-associated risks. VP would have you believe that minute quantities of aluminum-based adjuvant or other Vaccine Toxins are grievously harmful to developing brains, but somehow serious infections with their raft of actual toxins causing release of large amounts of cytokines are inconsequential.

In a way, it's amusing to see so many fallacies dressed up in pseudoscientific jargon in defense of antivax ideology.

I want to reemphasize your later point - that if inflammation was the issue, the diseases would be the concern, not the tiny amounts of aluminum salts in vaccines. VP suggested earlier that measles does not cause inflammation in the brain - which is strange in a disease for which one of the complications is encephalitis, in about 1:1000. Mumps can also cause encephalitis, and other diseases also have such effects. So if the issue was inflammation, why are the vaccines the culprit and not the solution?

" Researchers measured the women’s levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a well-established measure of inflammation. They found that the risk of autism in the children of women with the highest levels of CRP was 43 percent higher than in those of the women with the lowest levels.”"

Elevated inflammation during gestation creates higher risk of injury from inflammation from vaccines. Its the "two-hit" model. First hit does not cause great damage, but creates vulnerability to a second hit. The second hit (vaccines) causes the injury.

"VP would have you believe that minute quantities of aluminum-based adjuvant or other Vaccine Toxins are grievously harmful to developing brains, but somehow serious infections with their raft of actual toxins causing release of large amounts of cytokines are inconsequential."

The quantities are not minute. They are proven to cause life-long debilitating brain injury and inflammation in the brain, at vaccine dosages. Al adjuvant causes long term chronic inflammation in the brain, because it puts aluminum in the brain. Normal infectious illnesses do not do this. They cause transient inflammation, not necessarily in the brain.

The part in bold: inflammation in brain, does not always lead to autism. This is a non-specific finding which can present in every brain on this planet leading to different results or pathology, if any (pathology that is) is present.

"Of course, there can be inflammation in autistic brain but that can be present in the normal brain too (fever among others), that is not, automatically brain damages. Furthermore, there is evidence from, at a minimum, the lab I was working in of excellent memory (we also studied autistic savants for which, the epidemiology is 1/5 autistic subjects having savants abilities compared to the general population rate of 1%).

Which again, goes against brain damage. Yes, autism is a pathology (a social one and sometime, a language one) but that doesn’t mean brain damage.

You get it?"

yes I get it. Thank you for explaining.

Yes inflammation must be intense and/or long enough to cause injury.

Autism is associated with intelligence genes. So, association with some types of improved cognitive function does not establish its not injury. We dont know what the cognitive function would be like in these individuals if they were not autistic.

As I mentioned, there are MANY reasons why autism is an injury-the inflammation, missing purkinje cells and associations with diseases. We know some of the causes, like early life infections and toxin exposures, and they are definitely not beneficial or benign.

Remarkably, recent evidence suggests that gene-environmental interaction at very early periods of fetal brain development produce ASD-related phenotypes. This has nothing to do with postnatal administration of adjuvanted vaccines.

""Because he’s talking about a “brain damage” which is so specific that this “inflammation” cannot be replicated by anything other than aluminum salts adjuvants.

Which leads me back to the question of why we find autistic children (and adults) who are entirely unvaccinated.

Anything that causes the right type of inflammation in the brain, of sufficient duration and/or intensity, can cause autism. Infections can cause autism, because infections can cause inflammation in the brain.

"Remarkably, recent evidence suggests that gene-environmental interaction at very early periods of fetal brain development produce ASD-related phenotypes. This has nothing to do with postnatal administration of adjuvanted vaccines."

The injury can occur prenatally or postnatally.

There is nothing in your cited papers that indicates the injury can occur only in the prenatal period.

The human brain has intense development after birth, including the formation of most synapses. Synapse formation is known to be disrupted in autism.

Differences observed in the prenatal period are simply indicators of vulnerability to vaccine injury.

Specifically, this vulnerability can be caused by things like nutrient deficiency (e.g. vitamin D deficiency) or genetic tendency to high inflammation or autoimmunity (which would create vulnerability to vaccination).

Autism is brain injury caused by early life inflammation in the brain. And thats exactly what Al adjuvant does.

Al adjuvant in fact stimulates the exact same type of immune activation (interleukin-6) proven to cause the disorder.

No it doesn't and your hand-waving isn't a substitute for evidence. As usual the VP crank starts off with his aluminium fixation, can't answer rebuttal nor provide evidence to support his claims then moves on to his other obsession, IL-6. Tell me VP crank, what is the order of tissue deposition for aluminium?

Such language is common in scientific literature, which is typically written with an (over) abundance of caution. What matters most is the data presented, not the opinions of the authors. The Wei IL-6 paper reviews strong evidence proving that IL-6 causes autism in animal models. Its proven beyond any reasonable doubt, at least in the animal models.

Also see this (IL-6 induces IL-17, so this paper is another replication of the IL-6 results):

Autism is brain damage caused by 9IL6 which is a causative agent even in autistic people having an IQ off the chart for which if there where no vaccines given and no injuries to the brain, autistic people would have even greater IQ. Everything else is correlational.

I think there's lots of assumptions in there but I'll leave it to the regulars because of work and commenting on a phone is awful.

abnormal social and communicative behavior, and repetitive behavior. Also, damage to purkinje cells and cerebellum. Successful animal model replications have been done in monkeys, which are obviously more human-like. The animal models are excellent models of human disease, since immune activation (infection) also causes autism in humans, and they produce the same physiological damage and behaviors. Also, the same drugs and brain inflammation is observed. The animal models match human autism in every way thats been tested. The validity of the immune activation animal models is accepted, by consensus.

“These MIA (maternal immune activation) animal models meet all of the criteria required for validity for a disease model: They mimic a known disease-related risk factor (construct validity), they exhibit a wide range of disease-related symptoms (face validity), and they can be used to predict the efficacy of treatments (predictive validity).”
–Dr Kimberley McAllister, UC Davis MIND Institute, Science, August 2016 (i.e. this paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6301/772 )

Autism is a "spectrum" which ranges from very severe to high functioning.....so pray tell, how can you use these "animal models" that you put so much faith in, to relate back to a single vaccine ingredient?

What matters most is the data presented, not the opinions of the authors.

This was a howler. Data pl. numpty and the interpretation of the data by the authors who know a helluva lot more on the subject than you do matters, not your free-wheeling associations and lack of intellectual integrity.

"All these evidences suggest that brain IL-6 may play an important role in the development of autism."

"IL-6 elevation in the brain, caused by the activated glia and/or MIA could mediate autism- like behaviors, through impairments of neuroanatomical structures and neuronal plasticity"

"Wei et al. developed a mouse model of over-expressing IL-6 in the brain with an adenoviral gene delivery approach and confirmed that IL-6 is an important mediator of autism-like behaviors. This study found that mice with an elevated IL-6 level in the brain developed autism-like behaviors (Wei et al., 2012a). These findings suggest that IL-6 elevation in the brain could modulate certain pathological alterations and contribute to the development of autism."

IL-6 causes the injury in the animal models, and aluminum adjuvant induces IL-6 in the brain.

Al adjuvant > IL-6 in brain > autism

If there is no animal model for autism, you haven't established vaccines induce IL-6 in the brain to produce pathology and that pathology is autism, then how can you possibly expect not to be laughed at.

VP: "Autism does not begin in utero."
VP: "The injury can occur prenatally or postnatally."

I detect a subtle lack of consistency here. :)

Of course, we're dealing with someone who's convinced of "strengths" in the Mawson article, while being incapable of understanding how its conclusions are disqualified by its multiple fatal flaws. When it comes to critical thinking skills, lack of consistency is the least of VP's problems.

Of course, this post will be dismissed as "snark" that doesn't address The Science - which I and others have discussed at length, only to be met with denial, Gish galloping to other misunderstood and/or irrelevant publications, and admonitions to read VP's blog, where all will be revealed..

Going back to VP's thing about aluminum. First VP says that Al (injected intramuscularly) can't be excreted, that it is stuck in the muscle.
Then VP says that Al moves to the brain.
Well, which is it? AL is stuck in the muscle forever, or Al can move through the body?

There is an excellent animal model of autism: immune activation exposure during early development.

Um, are you unclear what "model of autism" means? Because you just said that the animal model of autism is the thing you claim causes autism.

We're not asking what you claim causes autism. We're asking how you know these animals have autism at all (or something similar enough to count). Merely possessing the thing you claim causes autism isn't enough, because you're trying* to test whether or not this thing causes autism.

*Well, theoretically. I'm making the possibly unwarranted assumption that you possess some degree of intellectual honesty.

Same behaviors. Same physiological damage. Same treatments are effective as humans. Same causes as in humans.

Thats a good animal model.

“These MIA (maternal immune activation) animal models meet all of the criteria required for validity for a disease model: They mimic a known disease-related risk factor (construct validity), they exhibit a wide range of disease-related symptoms (face validity), and they can be used to predict the efficacy of treatments (predictive validity).”
–Dr Kimberley McAllister, UC Davis MIND Institute, Science, August 2016 (i.e. this paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6301/772 )

You dont have evidence that those defects are present prenatally. Thats ASSUMED.

Those statements are based on decades of research in developmental biology. If you hope to contradict not only that evidence but the evidence from an entire field of biology, you need to do something more than wave your hands.

[']Women with autoimmune diseases are more likely to produce “antibrain antibodies,” which can attack the brain tissue of a fetus.[']

<stagmom>And are due to maternal vaccinations.</stagmom>

[']Women who have an infection during pregnancy may also be at increased risk of having children with autism.[']

"

<Dachelbot>"Besides bad genes, experts like to associate the habits of mothers with the developmental of autism: old moms, young moms, fat moms, moms who have C-sections, drinking moms, smoking moms, moms who have babies too close together, moms who marry old dads, moms who live too close to freeways."</Dachelbot>

All those things cause inflammation prenatally, which greatly increases vulnerability to vaccine injury. When there is already inflammation present, additional inflammation (from vaccine) is made more harmful.

All those things cause inflammation prenatally, which greatly increases vulnerability to vaccine injury. When there is already inflammation present, additional inflammation (from vaccine) is made more harmful.

@ VP
I don't think that your hypothesis is impossible. But before it is seriously considered, you should provide some evidence of the correlation between aluminium in vaccines or changes in the schedule of vaccines and the rise in autism incidence.

There are no epidemiological studies of Al adjuvant exposure and autism. There is zero human data. The MMR-autism studies dont count because MMR does not contain aluminum. No studies of autism look at Al adjuvant exposure.

There is the Shaw ecological study, but being ecological, it doesnt mean much. Its useful for hypothesis generation only.

The animal studies on autism and Al adjuvant are convergent and strongly indicate that Al adjuvant is a serious safety hazard. Animals suffer brain injury and inflammation from the same dosages given to human infants.

@ Dorit reiss"VP suggested earlier that measles does not cause inflammation in the brain – which is strange in a disease for which one of the complications is encephalitis, in about 1:1000. Mumps can also cause encephalitis, and other diseases also have such effects. So if the issue was inflammation, why are the vaccines the culprit and not the solution?"

I never stated that measles does not ever cause inflammation in the brain. it definitely can. But your risk of 1:1000 is overstated. That may be the risk for REPORTED cases, not total number of actual cases of measles.

Vaccines are the culprit because of the aluminum adjuvant. it travels to the brain, which is extremely sensitive to low levels of aluminum. Vaccines contain far more than enough aluminum to cause brain injury. In the recent experiment with 200mcg/kg, about 1.3% traveled to the brain over 6 months, which was enough to cause brain injury and long term inflammation.

Orthodox medicine faces the blame for the epidemic of vaccine brain injury known as autism.

You are trying to convince Alain that he is brain-damaged. Alain does not believe you. Your main rhetorical technique seems to consist of begging as many questions as possible within each single sentence, so you're probably not convincing anyone else either.

OK. I get an e-mail notification every time there is a comment. I'm getting tired of seeing half the comments here by VP. This is basically the sort of flooding of a comment thread designed to drown out the rest of my commenters. I've put up with it for around three days now, but it has be, and VP's responses are very repetitive and incredibly tiresome. If the pace of posting doesn't slow, I will take measures to slow it. I won't ba outright, but I have my ways. Moderation delay is generally the first step.

I am merely responding to objections and questions. Im not trolling or flooding. I am the only one here representing contrary opinion, so of course that creates a higher level of responses. Not my intention to take over. Sorry that impression occurred. Was planning to abandon this thread today, since it is getting repetitive.

Oh, you'll be back. You always come back eventually. This episode had just started to get on my nerves because of your repetition. And, yes, you were trolling and flooding. As for the "science," you do seem way too enamored of mouse studies.

@ Vinu
I mean babies with autist siblings.
@ VP
What has to be explained is the rise in autism incidence after adjustment for diagnostic criteria change. If there is no evidence for concomitant changes in aluminium injections, why would people be interested in your hypothesis, knowing that testing it will be tricky?

Same behaviors. Same physiological damage. Same treatments are effective as humans. Same causes as in humans.

Thats a good animal model.

“These MIA (maternal immune activation) animal models meet all of the criteria required for validity for a disease model: They mimic a known disease-related risk factor (construct validity), they exhibit a wide range of disease-related symptoms (face validity), and they can be used to predict the efficacy of treatments (predictive validity).”
–Dr Kimberley McAllister, UC Davis MIND Institute, Science, August 2016 (i.e. this paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6301/772 )

Another case of Dan the VP crank hearing what he wants to hear and not understanding or critically-evaluating.

Oh look it's the Who's Who of aluminium cranks. Another case of overdosing, non-randomisation, non-blinding, irrelevant animal tests, a couple of statistically-significant results and no clinical relevance. But this tells the VP crank what he wants to hear so it's "good science".

The new science showing the Mitkus analysis (the foundation for Al adjuvant safety) is wrong?

What is this "new science" you speak of?

The links between Al adjuvant and immune activation/cytokine brain injury?

Evidence?

This is where the vaccine controversy is headed.

Only in your fevered imagination. But I guess every crank needs a hobby.

Darn, I was hoping to hear further revelations about f VP's Dreadful Particles, which "dont dissolve and they cannot be excreted by the kidneys" but somehow magically cross the blood-brain barrier and cause The Autism.

I'm sure that can be explained as readily as the concept of brain inflammation in utero and in early infant life which is perfectly harmless if it comes from infection and maternal autoimmune disorders - but not if it is due to DEM EVIL VACCINES, in which case it causes The Autism.

I see VP is still fixated on the idea that IL-6 from "vaccine induced inflammation" is the cause of autism, but somehow overlooks the inconvenient fact that the main triggers for IL-6 production are infections, particularly the childhood vaccine-preventable ones.

If IL-6 caused autism, then the rates would have been higher prevaccine than they are now.

You are trying to convince Alain that he is brain-damaged. Alain does not believe you. Your main rhetorical technique seems to consist of begging as many questions as possible within each single sentence, so you’re probably not convincing anyone else either.

Given that in the last two day, I only slept 3 hours but did enjoy an overfull night of sleep last night, I had the time to think about the whole mess and will write about it targeting VP in a few hours but I had to dig deep in the past WRT some of my experiences posting on AoA (among other) but definitely Orac is very right on a recent post (not referring to this one although this one is very right & fine too).

Me. I go by my first name. You could even deduct my last name from the post where I list the publication I worked on as part of the team of scientist coworker working on an auditory neuroimaging meta-analysis close to 10 years ago.

I do enjoy reading your blog. Its helpful to understand opposing opinion.

For certain values of "understand." Face it, Dan: your whoe trip is priggish in the extreme. Is there some reason you host the pirated material rather than just commenting on it and telling you audience how to steal it themselves?

I'm somehow reminded of the Little Rascals/Our Gang episode in which a chicken plucks off the cowlick from a hiding Alfalfa, who has to suppress a loud cry of "My personality!"

Okay, VP (Dan), since you said " Its helpful to understand opposing opinion” it would seem you would understand actual opposing data. Did you watch the video I posted earlier on autism genetics? Did you understand that this is what is going forward with discoveries that will actually help children?

So that is your answer? Do tell us how being a vape supplier gives you moew expertise than the actual autism researchers who gave the presentation. Then post the PubMed indexed studies that show the following is wrong:

(for those following along, the relevant pie charts start at about a half hour into the video)

And 45% are still unknown, hence the massive recruitment for families for SPARK for Autism by the Simons Foundation (https://sparkforautism.org/).

At around the 57th minute there is a slide of various groups parents have formed around the specific genetic sequence their child has. It includes FamiliesSCN2A and ADNPkids.

At 59 minutes there is a slide showing how knowing the specific gene sequence is important. For instance those with SCN1A need to avoid sodium channel blockers, and those with SCN8A need to use sodium channel blockers.

Just post your "Vaccine Papers" showing those sequences are wrong right here. Because we are not going to your silly cherry picked web site.

It's amusing to see yet again that while anti-vaxxers think that "gene X environment" interactions must somehow, sorta-kinda implicate vaccines, they ignore that the environment includes the expression of other genes. I suppose that the fact that the parents and siblings of children with ASD are more likely than the general population to be similarly affected or to evidence the broader autism phenotype must mean, in AoA-speak, well, nothing. Or vaccines. Because vaccines.

Oh, lo! Here I am stuck in automatic moderation because of a stupid sock puppet from Wisconsin! And yet Dan the Vape Man can tell us exactly why he is smarter than actual PhD persons who research autism genetics.

I don't think you are. I looked at the list and didn't see your e-mail address anywhere on the automod list. I can't figure out why you got stuck. Ditto for a couple of the other regulars, whom I also checked. Strange are the ways of WordPress.

Heritability estimates are derived from twin studies, which must assume there is no GXE [sic] interaction. That assumption is wrong, so the high heritability estimates are wrong.

At the end of the day, I think it's Dan's carefully reasoned nuance that really makes the performance so persuasive. It's not as though there are dozens of spot-on reviews he could be "deconstructing" on his site, after all.

The associations of hundreds of genes with autism is meaningless. No way to calculate or estimate heritability from those results.

For many years, I've been an important person in the life of the daughter of my best female friend (I've been living with them for many years despite having my own apartment) and I learned very recently that she got accepted to veterinary medicine school and will begin her studies next august.

(Say, do Kiwis always go off into a haka like that when they’re angry? It’s pretty impressive)

I have never performed a haka, nor have any of my immediate family, and it is not for lack of getting angry. Of course we may not be representative Kiwis. Family traditions are more along the lines of "Gnaw at the edge of shield, howl like a bear, froth at the mouth, charge into battle wielding sword in a frenzy".

This turns out to be an unconstructive way to approach an academic disagreement.

And that's VP, intrepid Person of Science, who derides others for allegedly favoring snark over substance.

Meantime, while we hear of celebrities who go to the dark side, here are a couple of them supporting children's health. And they had to navigate dense underbrush and brave an onslaught of hippos, crocodiles and antivaxers:

In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial—the gold-standard design—a component of marijuana called cannabidiol (CBD) reduced seizures in children with a rare and devastating form of epilepsy...

The trial was sponsored by GW Pharmaceuticals, which has branded its CBD oil Epidiolex. The company has already received a “Fast Track” designation from the Food and Drug Administration to hasten its approval process, which will begin later this year. Currently there are no FDA-approved drugs specifically for Dravet syndrome.

Of course, there is no 'high' associated with CBD although the whole herb witch includes THC remediates some CBD side effects.

I'm ambivalent; Something that is deemed 'medicine' is still taken away from the people and put behind a sometimes-insurmountable prescription wall.

Similarly, he voted against a measure to allow Veterans Affairs doctors to recommend medical marijuana to their patients, as well as against a separate measure to loosen federal restrictions on hemp, a non-psychoactive variant of the cannabis plant with potential industrial applications.

In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial—the gold-standard design—a component of marijuana called cannabidiol (CBD) reduced seizures in children with a rare and devastating form of epilepsy…

Yeah, but did you read the entire article? Didja see this part?

But these benefits had costs. Ninety-three percent of those taking CBD reported side effects, while only 75 percent of placebo participants made similar reports. The most common side effects reported in the CBD group (and at much higher rates than the placebo group) were sleepiness, diarrhea, and loss of appetite. Other side effects included fatigue, vomiting, raised body temperature, lethargy, upper respiratory tract infections, and elevated liver enzymes. Eight participants taking CBD withdrew from the trial due to the side effects, as did one in the placebo group.

Effective? Maybe. Safe? Gee, I dunno.

Of course, there is no ‘high’ associated with CBD although the whole herb witch includes THC remediates some CBD side effects.

Something that is deemed ‘medicine’ is still taken away from the people and put behind a sometimes-insurmountable prescription wall.

There's a lot of medicines that are prescription only. Mostly those that are effective and have high incidence of side effects. You know, like possible liver failure.

“the only way I would agree to consider legalizing marijuana is if we had a really in depth-medical scientific study. If it does help people one way or another, then produce it in pill form.”

Isn't that the smart thing to do? Controlled, measured dosage to achieve the desired therapeutic effect. That's hard to get in a biological sample - too much variation. That is, if your goal is good medicine. If you just wanna get high, well, YMMV.

Fekkin’ pharma shill.

I know, right? Who paid for this study? From your link -

The trial was sponsored by GW Pharmaceuticals, which has branded its CBD oil Epidiolex.

Did you read the disclosures? (bolding mine)

Dr. Devinsky reports receiving grant support from Novartis, PTC Therapeutics, and Zogenix and holding equity interest in Rettco, Pairnomix, Tilray, and Egg Rock Holdings. Dr. Cross reports receiving grant support, paid to her institution, from GW Pharmaceuticals, Zogenix, Sanofi, and Vitaflo; fees for serving on an advisory board, paid to her institution, from Eisai; lecture fees, paid to her institution, from Shire and Nutricia; and consulting fees, paid to her institution, from Takeda. Dr. Marsh reports serving as a site primary investigator for a trial supported by Neuren Pharmaceuticals and receiving consulting fees from Stanley Brothers Social Enterprises. Dr. Miller reports receiving honoraria and travel support from INSYS Therapeutics. Dr. Scheffer reports receiving travel support and fees for serving on a scientific advisory board from GlaxoSmithKline; receiving travel support and lecture fees from UCB and Sanofi; receiving lecture fees from Eisai and Transgenomic; holding a patent on diagnostic and therapeutic methods for epilepsy and mental retardation limited to female patients, for which a single royalty payment has been made to University of Melbourne Commercial (WO2009086591); and holding a patent on methods of treatment and diagnosis of epilepsy by detecting mutations in the SCN1A gene, which has been licensed by Bionomics (WO2006133508). Dr. Thiele reports receiving consulting fees from Eisai, grant support and consulting fees from Zogenix Pharmaceuticals, and grant support from Courtagen. Dr. Wright reports being an employee of GW Pharmaceuticals, holding a pending patent on the use of cannabinoids in the treatment of epilepsy (WO2015193667), and holding a patent on the use of phytocannabinoids in the treatment of epilepsy (EP2448637). No other potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.

Hmm. That was addressed in the article. Valproic acid (depakote), which is also given for seizures/epilepsy, will elevate detected liver enzymes all by itself:

But some of the side effects may have been due to drug combinations, not CBD alone. For instance, kids in the CBD group who were also taking the epilepsy drug valproate were the only ones to experience liver problems as a side effect.

Controlled, measured dosage to achieve the desired therapeutic effect. That’s hard to get in a biological sample – too much variation.

What is the major damage of this society that disgards *use until desired effect* for an otherwise non toxic substance? There is immediate feedback with smoking/vaping vs ingested/pills. People are different; The homogenized 'standard dose' is retarded with most drugs -- Universal joint; fits everything but your car.

Gilly*, just say that you want easy access to legal pot so you can get high, and stop with the medicine stuff, m'kay? We know it, you know it, and it would save all of us a lot of time. It might even happen someday. I want drive-thru 5 cent beer stands, and, while beer is currently legal, I think you'll get your wish sooner than I get mine.

I'll admit that there might be a therapeutic use for weed. There are enough chemical compounds in it that I believe it's more than possible. But claiming it's a cure all prior to finding the evidence is just dishonest.

Yes, the current drug laws are pretty messed up. Pot is mostly legal to have and use almost everywhere, but it's illegal to import, grow and sell across the entire country. It was a screwed up situation during Prohibition, and it's just as screwed up now. Working to change the law is a noble endeavor, but trying to back-door legalization under the guise of "it's medicine" is despicable.

I have zero interest in pursuing a future in Epidemiology. I just question why many studies list "excluded due to confounding variables" that match the criteria in the "Conditions commonly misperceived as contraindications" column in the CDC guidelines.

If a demographic group has already been declared as part of the representative group by the CDC, don't you lose the discretion to exclude?

@ Narad #103:

It occured to me that something may have changed as I have not worked Mom/Baby for about 10 years so I did check & Colorado is still vigilant in their "Colorado Universal Hep B" campaign that provides incentives & annual "scoring" of facilities & MD's utilizing standing orders.

My statement was not meant to imply that vaccination is done without signed consent; it was made in the context of a study that could have been invalidated due to recall bias of the mothers, as it did not utilize medical records to cross-reference their recall.

This is my position based on personal assessment vs "just" professional & I don't claim any scientific precedent for my reasoning.

Simply put; I gave birth to 11 children here in Colorado & 9 out of the 11 were born after 1991 when the Hep B was added to the CDC schedule.

I can "recall" giving consent for exactly 5 of those 9 although their immunization records reflect that I consented for all my children to receive not just the Hep B but all their recommended immunizations.

I'm sure the consents are legit; I would not have refused. I just don't "recall" it.

Seven of the eleven were born during the years when the "Discharge home 24hrs post-delivery for low-risk prenatal/birth/infant apgar" was a trend with MCO's. Do you know how many times various department representatives run in & out of the room with stacks of papers to be signed, all while you are sleep-deprived & half delerious when discharge is planned for 24 hrs post-delivery?

I just don't think there is much potential for "accurate recall" & the study relies soley on accurate recall; thats all.

And; you & your links. I vascilate. I'm concerned & I want to be wrong. Am I not in the right place (this blog/venue) if I'm looking for the right people to make me wrong?

I'm pretty sure I've written less than 10 comments here & I believe I've asked questions as many times as I've made statements. Carry on ...

I just question why many studies list “excluded due to confounding variables” that match the criteria in the “Conditions commonly misperceived as contraindications” column in the CDC guidelines.

Because they are confounding variables and will confound.

So, we know for example that fragile X syndrome results in symptoms similar to autism. If you include these children in a study of whether vaccines are related to autism, you will have a whole group of children showing autism-like symptoms regardless of whether they were vaccinated or not. That muddies the water unnecessarily.

The fact that you lack the understanding that this is a problem renders your comments about which children should be included in a study useless.

Check out the ever-exciting raffle, and dance, dance, dance to the DJ's tunes!"

Sort of disappointing they aren't dancing to the hip tunes of The Refusers. And seeing the emphasis that crowd places on avoiding unhealthy diet to improve symptoms of autistic children, they're not setting a great example with a menu heavy on meat and calorific chocolate desserts.

Actually, we had some strawberries with thick dark chocolate sauce with a nice Merlot wine, and just now finished watching "The Accountant" with Ben Affleck playing the autist who is a sharpshooter with math and bullets.

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